“Never on Sunday”: Examining the shape of the distribution of births throughout the weekdays.

During the post-war years, the daily births in the developed countries suggest a systematic decline in Sundays and in a lesser degree in Saturdays too. This fact is related to practices of the medical profession as for obvious reasons, they plan their working hours. Such practices have a significant impact on hospital infrastructure as they cause overload on certain days, and under-utilization of the hospital services in others. However the intensity and the starting time of this phenomenon significantly differ between countries, while in some of them, the appearance of reactions, as well as the awareness of the medical body, resulted to a reversal of this trend in recent years. In this work, an index is used for measuring the intensity of this phenomenon and time series analysis techniques are applied in order to provide a comparative analysis of the shape and the evolution of the daily fluctuations of births in a variety of European countries and the USA. In addition using statistical clustering techniques, a classification of these countries according to the starting time, the progress and the intensity of this phenomenon is attempted.