Laws and Policies Governing Population and Family Planning

ＬａｗｓａｎｄＰｏｌｉｃｉｅｓＧｏｖｅｒｎｉｎｇＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎＡｎｄＦａｍｉｌｙ　ＰｌａｎｎｉｎｇＬａｗｓａｎｄＰｏｌｉｃｉｅｓＧｏｖｅｒｎｉｎｇＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎａｎｄＦａｍｉｌｙＰｌａｎｎｉｎｇＴｈｅｆｏｌｌｏｗｉｎｇａｒｅｓｅｌｅｃｔｅ...     

A Simulating Model of Fertility Policy and Population Trends in China

ＡＳｉｍｕｌａｔｉｎｇＭｏｄｅｌｏｆＦｅｒｔｉｌｉｔｙＰｏｌｉｃｙａｎｄＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎＴｒｅｎｄｓｉｎＣｈｉｎａＺｈａｎｇＥｒｌｉ，ＣｈｅｎＪｉａｎｌｉ＆ＷａｎｇＡｉｑｉａｎｇＣｈｉｎａ’ｓｐｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎｐｏｌｉｃｙａｎｄｆａｍｉｌｙｐｌ...     

Fertility Decline and Population Growth:China''''s Dilemma

ＦｅｒｔｉｌｉｔｙＤｅｃｌｉｎｅａｎｄＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎＧｒｏｗｔｈ：Ｃｈｉｎａ＇ｓＤｉｌｅｍｍａＣｈｉｎａｈａｓａｔｐｒｅｓｅｎｔａｐｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎｏｆｏｖｅｒ１．２ｂｉｌｌｉｏｎ，ｗｈｉｃｈｉｓｍｏｒｅｔｈａｎｔｈｅｐｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎｏｆ...     

How Do Education and Family Planning Accelerate Fertility Decline?

Education and family planning can both be influenced by policy and are thought to accelerate fertility decline. However, questions remain about the nature of these effects. Does the effect of education operate through increasing educational attainment of women or educational enrollment of children? At which educational level is the effect strongest? Does the effect of family planning operate through increasing contraceptive prevalence or reducing unmet need? Is education or family planning more important? We assessed the quantitative impact of education and family planning in high-fertility settings using a regression framework inspired by Granger causality. We found that women's attainment of lower secondary education is key to accelerating fertility decline and found an accelerating effect of contraceptive prevalence for modern methods. We found the impact of contraceptive prevalence to be substantially larger than that of education. These accelerating effects hold in sub-Saharan Africa, but with smaller effect sizes there than elsewhere.     

Do Immigrants Suffer More From Job Loss? Unemployment and Subjective Well-being in Germany

This study asks whether immigrants suffer more from unemployment than German natives. Differences between these groups in pre-unemployment characteristics, the type of the transition into unemployment, and the consequences of this transition suggest that factors intensifying the negative impact of unemployment on subjective well-being are more concentrated in immigrants than in natives. Based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1990–2014; N = 34,767 persons aged 20 to 64; N = 210,930 person-years), we used fixed-effects models to trace within-person change in subjective well-being across the transition from employment into unemployment and over several years of continued unemployment. Results showed that immigrants’ average declines in subjective well-being exceeded those of natives. Further analyses revealed gender interactions. Among women, declines were smaller and similar among immigrants and natives. Among men, declines were larger and differed between immigrants and natives. Immigrant men showed the largest declines, amounting to one standard deviation of within-person change over time in subjective well-being. Normative, social, and economic factors did not explain these disproportionate declines. We discuss alternative explanations for why immigrant men are most vulnerable to the adverse effects of unemployment in Germany.     

A Case for “Reverse One-Child” Policies in Japan and South Korea? Examining the Link Between Education Costs and Lowest-Low Fertility

Household spending on children’s pre-tertiary education is exceptionally high in Japan and South Korea, and has been cited as a cause of low fertility. Previous research attributes this high spending to a cultural emphasis on education in East Asian countries. In this paper, we argue that institutional factors, namely higher education and labor market systems, play an important role in reinforcing the pressure on parents to invest in their children’s education. We review evidence showing that graduating from a prestigious university has very high economic and social returns in Japan and South Korea, and examine the implications for fertility within the framework of quantity–quality models. Finally, we put forward ‘reverse one-child’ policies that directly address the unintended consequences of these institutional factors on fertility. These policies have the additional virtues of having very low fiscal requirements and reducing social inequality.     

Daughters-in-Law as Caregivers: How and Why Do They Come to Care?

ABSTRACT

This exploratory qualitative study examines the family dynamics and socio-structural factors which explain how and why some women become caregivers to in-laws. As well, it explores prevailing attitudes about care by in-laws. Material is drawn retrospectively from three previous studies of caregivers in Montreal, Quebec, including 10 semi-structured interviews with daughters-in-law and 72 interviews with spousal and child caregivers. An exploratory framework of the factors which are determinant in becoming a daughter-in-law caregiver is proposed which includes such elements as: social and cultural norms regarding family responsibility for eldercare; social and cultural norms regarding the place and the rights of the elderly; rules of family relations, couple dynamics, gender dynamics and family availability.     

Climigration? Population and climate change in Arctic Alaska

Residents of towns and villages in Arctic Alaska live on “the front line of climate change.” Some communities face immediate threats from erosion and flooding associated with thawing permafrost, increasing river flows, and reduced sea ice protection of shorelines. The term climigration, referring to migration caused by climate change, originally was coined for these places. Although initial applications emphasized the need for government relocation policies, it has elsewhere been applied more broadly to encompass unplanned migration as well. Some historical movements have been attributed to climate change, but closer study tends to find multiple causes, making it difficult to quantify the climate contribution. Clearer attribution might come from comparisons of migration rates among places that are similar in most respects, apart from known climatic impacts. We apply this approach using annual 1990–2014 time series on 43 Arctic Alaska towns and villages. Within-community time plots show no indication of enhanced out-migration from the most at-risk communities. More formally, there is no significant difference between net migration rates of at-risk and other places, testing several alternative classifications. Although climigration is not detectable to date, growing risks make either planned or unplanned movements unavoidable in the near future.     

Do Siblings’ Fertility Decisions Influence Each Other?

Individuals’ fertility decisions are shaped not only by their own characteristics and life course paths but also by social interaction with others. However, in practice, it is difficult to disentangle the role of social interaction from other factors, such as individual and family background variables. We measure social interaction through the cross-sibling influences on fertility. Continuous-time hazard models are estimated separately for women’s first and second births. In addition to individual socioeconomic variables, demographic variables, and an unobserved factor specific to each sibling pair, siblings’ birth events and their timing enter as time-varying covariates. We use data from longitudinal population-wide Norwegian administrative registers. The data cover more than 110,000 sibling pairs and include the siblings’ fertility, education, income, and marital histories. Our results indicate that cross-sibling influences are relatively strong for the respondents’ first births but weak for the second parity transition.     

China’s Tibetan Population and Population in Tibet

Ｃｈｉｎａ’ｓＴｉｂｅｔａｎＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎａｎｄＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎｉｎＴｉｂｅｔＧｕｏＤａｐｉｎｇ（ＣｈｉｎａＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎｉｎｆｏｒｍａｔｉｏｎａｎｄＲｅｓｅａｒｃｈＣｅｎｔｒｅ）ＴｈｅＴｉｂｅｔ（Ｘｉｚａｎｇ）ＡｕｔｏｎｏｍｏｕｓＲ...     

Can We Still Learn Something From the Relationship Between Fertility and Mother’s Employment? Evidence From Developing Countries

In this work, I study the impact of fertility on mothers’ employment for a sample of developing countries. Using the event of multiple births as an instrumental variable (IV) for fertility, I find that having children has a negative impact on female employment. In addition, three types of heterogeneity are found. First, the magnitude of the impact depends on the birth at which the increase in fertility takes place. Second, the types of jobs affected by a fertility shock (multiple births) are jobs identified with a higher degree of informality, such as self-employment or unpaid jobs. Finally, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that an unexpected change in fertility is stronger at a higher education level of the mother and in urban areas.     

Book Review Do Population Policies Matter? Fertility and Politics in Egypt,India, Kenya,and Mexico. Anrudh Jain (Ed.). New York,NY: Population Council, 1998. 225 p. $14.95(paperback); ISBN 0-87834-091-2

Population and Environment -     

Population and Family Planning in Tibet

ＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎａｎｄＦａｍｉｌｙＰｌａｎｎｉｎｇｉｎＴｉｂｅｔＴｉｂｅｔａｎＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎＳｔｕｄｙＴｅａｍＳｅｎｔｂｙｔｈｅＣｈｉｎａＰｏｐｕｌａｔｉｏｎｉｎｆｏｒｍａｔｉｏｎａｎｄＲｅｓｅａｒｃｈＣｅｎｔｒｅＴｈｉｓｐａｐｅｒｉｓａｎ...     

Why the Total Fertility Rate of 2010 Population Census is so Low?

The total fertility rate of 2010 population census hits a new low record.Careful analysis shows that such a new low fertility rate is mainly resulted from the declined fertility rate in first parity despite the slightly increased fertility rates in second order and over.The total fertility rate at first parity has fallen the most among the rural residents due to remarkably postponed age of marriage or child-bearing,so ever large percentage of unmarried women in their bearing age helps to depress the fertility rate at first parity.After excluding the parity structural effect of women,measured with the progressive fertility rates,the levels of the 2010census have kept almost the same as those in year 2005.Therefore,fertility decline in the latest census cannot be simply attributed to under-reported births.In addition,the latest census turns out that the life fertility rate is around 1.5,almost reaching to the requirement of current fertility policy.     

Apocalypse when? Population growth and food supply in South Asia

Food demands for staple grains are expected to almost double over the next 25 years in South Asia, due to population growth and increased standards of living. Trends in the mid-1990s suggest that neither pessimism nor optimism prevails in the region. There is wide diversity among and within countries. Trends suggest that population densities are already the highest in the world, and the amount of arable land is declining. Urban growth has moved onto farm land and farmers have been pushed onto more marginal lands or have become landless. Land intensification has produced mixed results. Cereal production per capita has increased since the 1950s in India, with about 75% of the region's population, but Pakistan's increases were not sustained into the 1980s. Average daily caloric intake per person in the region of 2214 is below the level in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Bangladesh, levels are particularly worrisome at 2037. The environmental impact has not been easily quantified, but experts have suggested that pressure on farm land has contributed to loss of soil fertility and water resource loss. Further intensification of farming is feasible, but difficult and more expensive than in the past. Regardless of production problems and solutions, there is also the very real problem of poor food distribution and lack of purchasing power. Farm management skills must be utilized, if environmental degradation is to be avoided. There is the added unknown of what climate changes will occur and how agricultural production will be affected. The policy implications are that increased food production must be made a political priority. Policies must support agricultural research into improved technologies and support distribution of technological advances to a wider number of farmers. Rural infrastructures such as roads, market outlets, and credit agencies must be established. Policies must be removed that disadvantage farmers, such as inappropriate subsidies for irrigation water, inadequate tenure agreements, and price setting. Slowing population growth provides time to adjust to expanding production and saving the environment.     

From Rags to Riches? Immigration and Poverty in Spain

This article for first time explores the relationship between immigration and poverty in Spain. Using recent Spanish household surveys, it is found, first, that both moderate and severe poverty are more acute among immigrants than among nationals and social transfers play no substantial role in reducing monetary deprivation in the case of foreign-born population; in the second place, we perform an econometric analysis that shows that the different poverty risk faced by local and immigrant households is not driven by differences in basic household and demographic characteristics.     

Editorial: Introduction to Special Issue, “Perspectives on Fertility and Population Size”

Population and Environment -     

Another Child? Fertility Ideals,Resources and Opportunities

Low fertility in most developed countries has prompted policy concern in relation to labour market supply, pensions, and expenditure on health and welfare services as well as policy debate about both the cost of children and the opportunity costs of parenthood. The extent to which family policy interventions can be effective in slowing or reversing fertility decline is much debated. This paper, based on a fertility module of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2005, examines the current fertility, and ideal and expected fertility of a nationally representative sample of 455 parents of reproductive age and focuses on whether they plan to have another child. It compares the characteristics of those who intend to have another child with those who do not, and how parents with one child differ from those with more children. It addresses three questions about family size: (1) fertility ideals, (2) resources and the economic implications of childbearing, and (3) opportunities for childbearing and the effects of a late start on fertility expectations. It concludes that, despite a sustained period of low fertility in Scotland, childbearing ideals are robust and explanations of low fertility must derive from difficulties in realising those ideals. Difficulties in realising fertility aspirations are associated less with resources than with opportunities for childbearing, especially the timing of first birth. Those who delay their first birth are less likely to realise their ideal family size, and their lower fertility is associated with the opportunity costs of childbearing in terms of foregone qualifications, careers and earnings.     

Armed Conflict and Fertility in Colombia, 2000–2010

Population Research and Policy Review - This paper looks at the association between the Colombian Armed Internal Conflict (AIC) and fertility for women in the first decade of the 21st century when...