Fertility throughout East Asia has fallen rapidly over the last five decades and is now below the replacement rate of 2.1 in every country in the region. Using South Korea as a case study, we argue that East Asia's ultra-low fertility rates can be partially explained by the steadfast parental drive to have competitive and successful children. Parents throughout the region invest large amounts of time and money to ensure that their children are able to enter prestigious universities and obtain top jobs. Accordingly, childrearing has become so expensive that the average couple cannot afford to have more than just one or two children. The trend of high parental investment in child education, also known as 'education fever', exemplifies the notion of 'quality over quantity' and is an important contributing factor to understanding low-fertility in East Asia.

Despite its importance as a part of the economic reform in China, sectoral employment has been overlooked as a potential determinant of child and adolescent obesity (CAO). Using large-scale longitudinal data from surveys conducted from 1989 to 2006, this paper examines the relationship between the sector in which a parent is employed and CAO, with the sector being based on ownership and categorised as either state or non-state. Analyses of over 1,700 children and adolescents show that children and adolescents whose parents work in the state sector are less likely to be obese. Patterns of sectoral employment's effect are robust across time periods, in fixed-effects models, and across multiple measures of obesity. Additionally, the paper shows that socioeconomic characteristics of the parent, such as income, education, and occupation, typically thought to be important predictors of CAO, are not as important when the parental working sector is included in the models.

This article compares coital experience of Chiang Mai 17-20-year-olds who were: (1) out-of-school; (2) studying at vocational schools; and (3) studying at general schools or university. Four-fifths, two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of males in these groups had had intercourse, compared to 53, 62 and 15 per cent of females. The gender difference for general school/university students, but not vocational school students, probably reflects HIV/AIDS refocusing male sexual initiation away from commercial sex workers. Vocational school females may have been disproportionately affected. Loss of virginity was associated, for both sexes, with social-educational background and lifestyle, and was less likely in certain minority ethnic groups. Among males, it was also associated with age and parental marital dissolution, and among females, with independent living and parental disharmony. Within social-educational groups, lifestyle variables dominated, but among general school/university students, parental marital dissolution (for males) and disharmony (for females) were also important, and Chinese ethnicity deterred male sexual experimentation.

Epidemiological studies show strong association between lack/inadequate family support with increased mortality and poor health among the elderly. This study examined the effect of living arrangement on elderly health status by analysing the data of 39,694 persons aged 60 and above included in India's second National Family Health Survey conducted in 1998-1999. Results indicate that elderly who are living alone are likely to suffer more from both chronic illnesses, such as asthma and tuberculosis, and acute illnesses, such as malaria and jaundice, than those elderly who are living with their family, even after controlling for the effects of a number of socio-economic, demographic, environmental and behavioural confounders. The findings have important programme and policy implications for countries such as India, which has the second largest elderly population in the world. There is a strong need for the implementation of specific public support systems and health care strategies focused on the elderly population in general and elderly living alone in particular.

High parity has been hypothesised to lead to a shorter and less healthy life. Using the 2007 Taft Ageing Health and Fertility Survey consisting of 696 women aged 50-79, this paper examines the extent to which women's health in middle and older ages is affected by their childbearing histories. The results show that high parity (> 8) is associated with a reduction of GP-rated health by 0.094 points on a scale from 1 to 10. These health reductions are four times as large as those of an extra year of age, and are robust to controlling for birth interval, age, area of residence, education, marital status, work history, economic satisfaction and surviving daughters. There is a positive but curvilinear relationship between shorter birth intervals (< 2 years) and GP-rated health accounting for socio-demographic factors. Our analysis suggests that parity and birth intervals, along with socio-demographic characteristics, affect women's well-being in later life.

This paper responds to recent calls for empirical study of the impact of age-structural transition. It begins by reviewing evidence of cohort oscillations in twentieth-century Indonesia, which indicates that current older generations are likely to have smaller numbers of children on whom they may rely than generations before and after them. However, to assess whether the imbalances implied by this situation are actually influencing people's lives, attention to further factors shaping the availability and reliability of younger generations, notably differences in socio-economic status and in patterns of inter-generational support flows, is required. Community-level Indonesian data confirm that elders in the lower social strata are child-poor. Social structural and family network patterns, however, have a greater influence on the availability of inter-generational support than cohort differentials.

Estimates of Thai crude birth and death rates date from 1920 when the former was around 20 per thousand higher than the latter, implying natural increase of 2 percent per annum. Such disequilibrium cannot have been the norm over the long term historical past, when population growth must have been comparatively slow. This paper explores the bases for likely past relative equilibrium between Siamese birth and death rates, then seeks to explain the disequilibrium apparent by 1920. Classic demographic transition theory postulates initially high birth and death rates, this equilibrium eventually being broken by falling mortality. In Thailand, however, there is likely to have been both significant mortality decline and appreciable fertility increase after 1850, as the virtual elimination of indigenous warfare, rapid growth of the export rice economy and the demise of slavery and corvée labour created a new domestic environment. Characterized by more dispersed, often frontier, settlement, this environment was unprecedentedly sedate and settled, afforded ordinary households a previously unknown level of control over their resources of labour, and generated optimism about prospects for the next generation.

While a large number of studies assumed gendered socialisation leads to partner abuse, little evidence exists for India. We bridge this crucial gap by exploring the pathways between childhood socialisation and intimate partner violence, using data 'Youth in India: Situation and Need Study (2006-2007)' for 5573 young married men (15-29 years). Nearly 17 per cent of men inflicted physical IPV in the past 12 months. Seventy-seven per cent recognized the experience of gender discrimination in their family and reported exposure to violence in two ways-one-third witnessed fathers abusing their mothers and 48 per cent were beaten by their parents. Adverse childhood experiences were associated with IPV perpetration. The structural equation model indicated significant pathways between IPV and childhood socialisation in the forms of experienced violence and gender discrimination. Findings underscore the importance of a violence-free, gender-neutral family environment for young generations and call for a comprehensive policy to ameliorate the impacts of IPV.

People in East and South Asia widely believe that having children brings fulfillment to an individual's life. However, over the past fifty years, modernisation in Asia has been accompanied by a remarkable drop in birth rates to a level even lower than most western countries. Prior research on western nations has shown that the time demands and financial stresses of parenthood, as well as current inflexible employment practices, contribute to the high cost of parenthood and discount the emotional rewards of having children. This study investigates the happiness of parents and childless individuals in East and South Asia, and whether social policies can improve parental happiness. We use individual-level data in 10 Asian countries from the World Values and the Asian Barometer Surveys, and find no country where parents report significantly greater happiness than non-parents after controlling for relevant sociodemographic differences. Multilevel models show that paid annual leave, paid maternity and parental leave, and flexible working schedules as well as a comprehensive policy index help alleviate the disparity in happiness between parents and non-parents across countries, in particular work flexibility, while family-friendly policies have no noticeable negative effects on non-parents' wellbeing.

Research addressing conflict and migration has made great strides in explaining the relationship between violence and migration. However, it commonly lacks individual-level data on exposure to war. We use survey data from the 2018 Vietnam Health and Aging Study to examine the associations between war-related violence exposure during the American War and the wartime migrations of northern Vietnamese war survivors. Using multilevel mixed-effects count models, we investigate three groups of factors influencing migration-war-related events, economic circumstances, and demographic and life course factors-to explore the relationship between war exposure and migration, inclusive of deployments, economic moves, and displacements. Our findings indicate that the effects of war exposure, socioeconomic status, and demographic characteristics diverge for different types of migration. These findings, framed within the life course and historical context, suggest the need to thoughtfully delineate both war exposures and traditional causes of migration to understand the diverse types of mobility occurring during periods of armed conflict.

Pressure to ban prenatal sex-selection has grown with rising sex ratios at birth in some countries. Governments feel pressured to act, and bans seem an immediate step they can take. However, such bans have been in place for some time in South Korea, China, and India and the available evidence suggests they are difficult to implement and have limited impact. This is indicated most clearly in the Chinese census data, which throw light on the mixed effects of a very intensive effort to implement the ban. Studies show that bans on sex-selection have negative consequences for unwanted girls and their mothers. By contrast, studies show that other policies - including mass messaging and measures to increase gender equity - show fairly quick impact in reducing son preference and increasing parental investment in girls. Such policies can permanently lower son preference and sex-selection, while also improving girls' life-chances.

Trends and determinants of marriage payments have rarely been examined at the population level despite their plausible implications for the welfare of family and the distribution of wealth across families and generations. In this study, we analyze population-based data from the Vietnam Study of Family Change to document prevalence and directions of marriage payments in Vietnam from 1963 to 2000. We investigate the extent to which structural and policy transformations (particularly market reform and the socialist policy that banned brideprice) influenced the practice of marriage payments as well as estimate how societal changes indirectly impacted payments via their effects on population characteristics. Results indicate that marriage payments surged following market reform but also reveal more nuanced trends and regional differences during earlier years. While the socialist attempts to eradicate brideprice appear to have been moderately successful in the North prior to economic renovation the evidence suggests they were largely unsuccessful in the South. Results suggest that structural and policy change explained most of the observed variations in marriage payments and that changing characteristics of the individuals who married mattered relatively little. We interpret the reemergence of marriage payments as attesting to resilience of traditional values and the unraveling of the socialist agenda, especially in the North, but also as a reflection of economic prosperity associated with market reform.

Over the past few decades, the level of divorce, measured by the crude divorce rate (CDR), has increased dramatically in both the East and the West, but has recently appeared to fall or level off in some countries. To investigate whether the recent decline or stabilisation of the CDRs reflects the real trends in divorce risk, a decomposition analysis was conducted on the changes in the CDRs over the past 20 years on two western and three East Asian countries, namely, the UK, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. The following is observed: the decline in the CDRs of the UK and Australia in the 1990s, and of Taiwan and Korea in the 2000s, was mainly due to shrinkage in the proportion of the married population rather than any reduction in divorce risk; only Australia experienced a genuine reduction in divorce risk between 2001 and 2011; and the continuous increase of Singapore's divorce level between 1990 and 2010 may be is an unintentional effect of the government's marriage promotion policies. The shift in the population age structure, and more importantly, the drastic decline in marriage, has seriously distorted the CDRs, making them unreliable indicators for monitoring divorce trends.

This paper examines patterns of remittances among migrants from Guizhou province of China. Our research is motivated by three lines of theoretical arguments, namely the new economics of migration, a translocal perspective linking remittances and development, and the culture of remittances. Taking individual, household, and village-level characteristics into account, we estimated multilevel logistic models of the decision to remit and multilevel models of the amount of remittances. Our results show that migrant remittance behaviour is responsive to family needs as well as household economic position in the village.. Migrants who come from entrepreneurial households are more likely to remit a large amount than other types of households. We find some evidence of "culture of remittances" in these villages. Consistent with our expectations, migrants who are from villages with higher amount of average remittances are likely to remit a larger amount than otherwise.

While rapid fertility decline in India in the last two decades has received considerable attention, much of the discourse has focused on a decline in high parity births. However, this paper finds that, almost hidden from the public gaze, a small but significant segment of the Indian population has begun the transition to extremely low fertility. Among the urban, upper income, educated, middle classes, it is no longer unusual to find families stopping at one child, even when this child is a girl. Using data from the India Human Development Survey of 2004-2005, we examine the factors that may lead some families to stop at a single child. We conclude that the motivations for this very low fertility are likely to be a more extreme form of those for low fertility rather than reflecting the qualitative change in ideologies and worldviews that is hypothesized to accompany very low fertility during the second demographic transition.

Theory suggests that relationships between intergenerational coresidence and married women's subjective well-being may be either positive or negative. We extend previous research on this question in two ways: by focusing also on geographical proximity to parents(-in-law) and by examining differences in married women's well-being both between and within different types of living arrangements. Using data from a nationally representative survey of adults in Japan, we found no differences in married women's subjective well-being between living arrangements, but observed significant differences within living arrangements depending on married women's position in the household and the direction of intergenerational support transfers. Our results suggest that comparisons across living arrangements may be complicated by within-group associations with well-being and that attention to married women's position in the household and the direction of intergenerational transfers is essential for understanding how married women in Japan experience different living arrangements.

Using a longitudinal dataset from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), growth curve models were employed to examine age trajectories of BMI for 1,694 subjects who were aged 2-11 in 1993 and followed in four waves (1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006). Based on age- and sex-specific BMI cut-points recommended for international use, the prevalence rates of overweight and underweight in the transition from childhood to adulthood (age 6-18) were also predicted. Sex, family income, rural-urban residency and geographical location were found to be significantly associated with the onsets, slopes, and acceleration of age trajectories in BMI, overweight, and underweight (P<0.01). Children who had lower prevalence of underweight in the transition from childhood to adulthood exhibited higher prevalence of overweight than their counterparts did. Moreover, the age interval during which children were more vulnerable to an increase in underweight was different from that for overweight. There were substantial regional disparities in the age trajectories of childhood overweight and underweight. Whereas the analyses suggest that the dual burden of nutritional problems (the coexistence of overweight and underweight) in China is more like two sides of a coin than two separate health issues, the critical age period for intervening in childhood overweight is different from that of childhood underweight. Geographical indicators of childhood obesity in China deserve further attention.