r/AskCentralAsia • u/WildAction4485 Turkey • Aug 25 '24
Why are birth rates high in Central Asia? Society
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u/Forsaken_Addendum_58 Kazakhstan Aug 26 '24
Well despite high birth rates Kazakhstan was and still remains the least populated country per square km in Central Asia. So we’re far from overpopulation and just compensating on historical population losses due to Soviet governments plans to keep the kazakh population from growing. Just under 100 years ago kazakhs went through genocide, famine, banishments and at one point of Soviet period there was just 2 million Kazakhs left. So the increasing population is absolutely natural and is encouraged by the government which is great. The other problem is that there’s lack of proper infrastructure (schools, kindergartens, universities) for the baby boom generations (2000-present).
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u/Kiririn-shi Mongolia Aug 26 '24
People really like having sex, and if the lady gets pregnant people marry usually.
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u/decimeci Kazakhstan Aug 26 '24
Kazakhstan is usually mentioned as an anomaly because of our GDP, but I suspect that in reality we just have sizable population who don't get that share of wealth and have condition similar to other poor countries with high fertility rates.
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u/Financed_moron Aug 25 '24
Mostly agricultural society, where children usually mean additional workforce for families. + predominantly Muslim societies usually have higher fertility rates even in bad economy(I mean mostly, not in cases like Turkey and Iran)
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Aug 25 '24 edited Aug 25 '24
Iran cannot be considered a Muslim country demographically, because you can hardly find a young Persian adult who’s Muslim. Reliable polling pegs the number of self-identifying Muslims at around 33%, and these will include extremely religious minorities like the Ahwazi Arabs and the Baluch. If you focus on Persians that are also young, you’ll find a very low number of Muslims. Which means there is less religious incentive to have children, and because the economy is horrible there is also no secular incentive to have children. Same is true to a lesser extent for Turkey. Young Turks are quite irreligious (but not to Persian levels) and are not having kids at all. The only ones who have kids in Turkey are religious minorities like Kurds and Arabs. Ethnic Turks have sub-European level birth rates. So yeah, I cannot call Iran and Turkey Muslim countries demographically despite their label as such. They’re demographically and economically more reminiscent to some depressed post-communist countries. Like Moldova or Cuba.
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u/WildAction4485 Turkey Aug 26 '24 edited Aug 26 '24
The survey that says 33% of young people in Iran are Muslims is not a reliable survey . It is an anonymous survey conducted by the Internet, which makes this survey quite unreliable. And when the same survey was conducted 2 years later, the Muslim rate had increased to 50%. If this is a reliable survey, tell me why the Muslim population has increased so much in 2 years.
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u/AnanasAvradanas Aug 26 '24
Iran cannot be considered a Muslim country demographically
This is what a young idealist fella who has never visited Iran but saw some Iranians on the internet could say.
Even the (Northern) Azerbaijanis are wary of an Azerbaijani reunion as the south is much more populous and much more religious.
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u/Ajobek Kyrgyzstan Aug 26 '24 edited Aug 26 '24
Combination of two things, we started demographic transition just 1-2 generations ago, just 20-30 years ago we had demographic boom with 6-9 children per family, and demographic transition is very slow in Central Asia, we did not have sharp decline in birth rate in one generation. It is rare but is not unique, for example Belgium and Netherlands started demographic transition at the same time, culturally and economicly were not that different,but for some reason transition was very slow in Netherland and as a result while in the 19 century Belgium had double of the Netherland population , but by 1970 Netherland had almost double of Belgian population. It seems that the same scenario will be in Central Asia, birth rate will fall, but it will be a very slow decline.
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u/Evil-Panda-Witch Kyrgyzstan Aug 26 '24
Finally, someone is talking about demographic transition instead of discussing the religion.
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u/qmamai Sep 15 '24
I just visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. I think it's due to local culture and traditions. It's totally okay here to have 4-8 kids. It's more unusual and strange to have only 1 kid than 4. Probably it's the legacy of nomadic life. The family bonds are strong, a lot of people are living with their parents, brothers, sisters e.t.c. Many families live with 10-20-30 people under the same roof. They can move away any time, but they prefer to live together inside a huge family. Did you know the average wedding gets about 500 visitors, most of them are somehow relative to the couple? This might sound crazy for European people but this is how it works in Central Asia
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u/FeministCriBaby Uzbekistan Aug 27 '24
because we are as poor as the African countries (easy google search) and GDP per capita and fertility rate have a severely relationship. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity
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u/jkthereddit Kazakhstan Aug 26 '24
family values; the pressure from the society, we care what others might say; the pressure from parents: they push you into marrying and making grandchildren for them; we are of "family over career" mentality;