ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that Ethiopia’s population growth has accelerated because of declining mortality and persistently high or even increasing fertility ratio. Poverty, war, and famine and their associated low levels of education and health, weak infrastructure, and low agricultural and industrial production exacerbated the problem of overpopulation, economic stagnation and decline. The Ethiopian population has traditionally been highly concentrated in the highlands. Few data are available to estimate the rate of internal migration and its trend over time, but it is known that both temporary and permanent internal migration were common in pre-1974 Ethiopia. Studies of the blood groups of Ethiopians have confirmed the cultural anthropological finding that this population is an admixture of Caucasoids, Negroids, and Bushmen, with the latter constituting a relatively small proportion of the ancestry. Absence of accurate time series of population data limits the estimation of the growth rate of the Ethiopian population over time.
