WALES - Population
A negative natural change
Wales' population of 2.9 million in 2002 is about 5 per cent of the United Kingdom?s total. Wales has a higher proportion of elderly people than the United Kingdom as a whole. While over the past 10 years the Welsh population has grown at an average rate of just over 0.1 per cent per year. These gains are mainly due to inward migration to rural areas: the population of industrial south Wales has, with the exception of Newport, seen a decline in its population due to continuing out-migration.
The average population density of Wales (140 inhabitants per square kilometres) is largely below that of the United Kingdom (243) but masks a wide variation between different parts of Wales.
The birth rate (10.3 per thousand inhabitants) was about one percentage point under the UK average in 2002. Furthermore, the opposite trend can be observed for the death rate: it is higher in Wales (11.4 per thousand inhabitants) compared to the UK level (10.2). The natural change was negative for Wales, whereas it was positive for the United Kingdom as a whole.
The infant mortality rate (4.5 deaths per thousand live births in 2002) is lower than the UK rate for the same year (5.2).
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