More Numbers

There was in interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning about the decline of foreign adoptions by Americans. You can read the full article here.

A key point in the article is the numbers released by the US State Department on the Number of US Visas released to Chinese orphans. This number is really just the number of children adopted by Americans from China last year. The article states:

Adoptions from China, the number one source country since 2000, fell to 5,453.
That is down by 1,040 from last year and well off the peak of 7,906 in 2005.

So we have:

2007 - 5453
2006 - 6493
2005 - 7906

That is 16% less adoptions from China this year than last year. The difference between 2006 and 2005 was a 17.8 % decrease. We all knew that these numbers were decreasing but it there is so much speculation out there it is nice to see concrete numbers sometimes. The State department numbers for previous years can be found here .

Update:

I also charted out the number of visas issued per year back to 1991. This info is also from the state dept. website. There have been a couple down years in the past but never two down years in a row. As always a picture says a thousand words.

Another Update:

I was looking some more at the State Department numbers and I found another page that lists the numbers of orphan visas by country back to 1990. I thought it would be interesting to see this charted out as well. I charted the top 9 countries by year and then added the rest in as "Other" to get the total. Interesting to see how things have changed historically. Overall the trend for international adoptions to the US is down for the last two years. There is so much data I could run analysis against it all day but I think this is enough for now.