Urban and Rural Natural Increase in Chile

Like Sweden among European countries, Chile has become popular among demographers interested in population movements in South America. In both cases, the attraction lies in the relative plenitude of historical data of fairly high quality and in the relative detail in which current data are published. Furthermore, as a country, Chile has seemed to some1 to be passing nicely through the so-called demographic transition, in which a fall in the death rate precedes a fall in the birth rate with an interstitial spurt in population growth. A great deal of optimism regarding future population trends in Chile, as in other developing countries, has attached to the process of urbanization. Given the fact that urban areas are now generally characterized by similar death rates but lower birth rates than rural areas, the implication is that as a country urbanizes, a greater proportion of the population will be exposed to the lower urban rate of natural growth and the population bomb will cease to explode. This paper is devoted to a consideration of the urban-rural differences in the rate of natural increase in Chile, analyzing both the changes in the rates themselves and the changes in differences in those rates between the urban and rural populations over the period 1952 to 1960. The purpose of such an