PETALING JAYA: Malaysia recorded 439,744 births last year, the lowest in a decade.
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This was a 6.7% drop from the 471,504 births recorded in 2020, the department of statistics said.
In a statement, the department said Malaysia’s crude birth rate declined from 14.5 per thousand of the population in 2020 to 13.5 last year.
It noted that fertility, as measured by the total fertility rate (TFR), has “declined significantly” over the last five decades.
The TFR dropped from 4.9 children per woman of childbearing age in 1970 to 1.7 in 2021, it said.
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The TFR is a demographic indicator used to estimate the average number of children that a woman would have over her childbearing years.
The department noted that the TFR for all major ethnic groups had been on the decline from 2011 to 2021.
“The TFR for all ethnic groups, except the Malays, was below the replacement level. The highest TFR level was recorded by Malays with 2.2 babies while the Chinese recorded the lowest TFR of 0.8 babies per woman aged 15 to 49 years old,” it said.
It also said the number of deaths in 2021 (224,569) was a 10-year high.
It was also a 34.5% increase when compared to the 166,970 deaths in 2020, with the spike due to the increase in the number of excess deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic last year.-FMT