Birth rate or fertility rate?
They are two different measurements of the same event and they do not rank countries in the same order. Using one where the other belongs is the most common mistake made with birth statistics, and it usually produces a claim about childbearing from a number that is really about age structure.
- 16.3world births per 1,000 people, 2023
- 46.4highest birth rate: Central African Republic
- 6.13highest fertility: Somalia
- 236countries and areas ranked
The two definitions
Crude birth rate
The number of live births in a year per 1,000 people in the population, everybody of every age and sex. Worldwide it was 16.3 in 2023. It is easy to compute, because it needs only a birth count and a population, and it goes straight into how fast a population changes: births per 1,000 minus deaths per 1,000 is the natural increase.
Total fertility rate
The number of children a woman would have if she lived through her whole childbearing life at one year's age-specific birth rates. It is built from the rates at each age, so it does not depend on how many people of that age a country happens to have. It needs births broken down by the mother's age, which is why it exists only from 1950 in this dataset.
Why they disagree
The crude birth rate divides by everyone. A country where a large share of the population is between twenty and forty will post a high birth rate even on modest fertility, and the same country thirty years later will post a low one on exactly the same fertility, because the same people have aged.
Colombia and France make it concrete. Both are below the replacement level of about 2.1, at 1.65 and 1.64 children per woman, yet Colombia records 13.5 births per 1,000 people against France's 9.6, roughly 1.4 times as many. Nothing in that gap is about family size. It is entirely a difference in who is alive and how old they are.
The same countries, both ways
The countries with the most births, plus the pair above, with their position under each measure out of every country ranked. Where the two ranks are far apart, the difference is age structure: the same country is high on one list and middling on the other without anything about its childbearing changing.
| Country | Births per 1,000 | Children per woman | Rank by birth rate | Rank by fertility | Births |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | 16.2 | 1.98 | 99 | 117 | 23,200,000 |
| China | 6.3 | 1.00 | 226 | 227 | 8,910,000 |
| Nigeria | 33.0 | 4.48 | 21 | 16 | 7,510,000 |
| Pakistan | 27.8 | 3.61 | 42 | 43 | 6,880,000 |
| Indonesia | 15.9 | 2.13 | 103 | 104 | 4,480,000 |
| DR Congo | 41.3 | 6.05 | 5 | 4 | 4,370,000 |
| Ethiopia | 31.9 | 3.99 | 24 | 28 | 4,110,000 |
| United States | 10.7 | 1.62 | 162 | 149 | 3,660,000 |
| Bangladesh | 20.4 | 2.16 | 77 | 102 | 3,490,000 |
| Brazil | 12.3 | 1.62 | 130 | 150 | 2,600,000 |
| Colombia | 13.5 | 1.65 | 120 | 144 | 705,000 |
| France | 9.6 | 1.64 | 173 | 145 | 639,000 |
Which one to use
Use the crude birth rate when the question is about the population: how fast it is being added to, how it compares with the death rate, how many babies a hospital system has to deliver. It is the right number for anything counted per head of population.
Use the fertility rate when the question is about childbearing: whether people are having more or fewer children than before, whether a country is above or below replacement, how two countries compare. It is the right number for anything about family size.
Neither of them is the number of babies born. That is a count, and it depends on both the fertility rate and how many people there are to have children. That is why world births kept rising for sixty years while the world birth rate fell throughout.
Both measures on this site come from the same source and the same decoder for every year from 1950. Fertility rates before 1950 are not published here at all, because the age-specific rates they are built from do not exist for those years. The birth rate does, as a reconstruction back to 1800 and as a modelled estimate before that.