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statistics

Working with statistics

A brief history of statistics in New Zealand

Beginnings

Overview - NZ in the 1960s

Population

Total births 1945-2008 graph

Total births 1945-2008 graph

This graph shows the total number of births for each year.

The highest number of births in one year was in 1961 when 65,476 babies were born. At this time the total population of New Zealand was 2.4 million compared to over 4 million in 2008, so the relative number of births per woman was much higher in the early 1960s (the peak of the 'baby boom') than in later years.

Information from the New Zealand Official Yearbook.