If you're a secular unmarried woman aged about 30 living in the center of Israel, you meet the criteria of the average Israeli. The annual survey of the Central Bureau of Statistics, published just before the Jewish New Year, reveals that in Jewish year 5774 Israel's population continued to grow at a rate of 1.9% as it has in previous years, and the population reached 8.13 million: 6.1 million Jews (75%), 1.7 million Arabs (20.7%), and 347 thousand others (4.3%).
Israel's population is young compared with the populations of Western countries. In 2013, children aged 0-14 represented 28.2% of the total. Nevertheless, the percentage of those aged 65 and over continued to rise, to 10.6%. The median age was 29.6, compared with 27.6 in 2000. The median age of men was 28.6 and of women 30.7. The ratio of men to women remains unchanged: there are 982 men in Israel for every 1,000 women.
People continue to marry later. 63.3% of Jewish men and 45.8% of Jewish women aged 25-29 were unmarried in 2012, compared with 54% of men and 33.3% of women in 2000. In the Muslim population, 45.5% of men and 18.8% of women aged 25-29 were unmarried, compared with 35.7% of men and 23.2% of women in 2000. 50,474 couples married, 75% of them Jewish, 21% Muslim. 13, 685 couples divorced, 81% of them Jewish, 13% Muslim. The rate of marriage among the population in 2012 was 6.4 per thousand, while the divorce rate was 1.7 per thousand.
171,444 children were born in Israel in 2013, 0.3% more than in 2012. 74% were born to Jewish mothers and 23% to Arab mothers. The average age of women giving birth was 27.5.
The average number of people per household was 3.3; 3.1 in the Jewish population, and 4.8 in the Arab population.
In 2013, there were 120 thousand one-parent families in Israel with at least one child aged under 18, representing 11% of all families in the country.
40% of Israel's population, and about half the Jewish population, lives in the central region. Almost 60% of the Arab population lives in the north of the country.
In 2013, life expectancy in Israel was 80.3 years for men and 83.9 years for women. Since the end of the 1970s, life expectancy has risen by 9.1 years for men and by 9.2 years for women. Life expectancy is higher for Jews than for Arabs. In 2013, the gap was 3 years for men and 3.4 years for women.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 22, 2014
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