Infant mortality is an important population health statistic that is often used to make health policy decisions. Unfortunately, these data are not available for all populations. A newly developed m...

Temporary internal migration is an important livelihood strategy but there have been inconsistencies in its conceptualisation and measurement which limit understanding of the phenomenon across dive...

The dynamic combination of an increasingly progressive gender revolution in modern Asia and cultural characteristics that include the hierarchisation of gender, especially in East Asia, has the pot...

Our study investigates the relationship between family models and housework division among older couples. Using the 2019 Korean Time Use Survey, we analysed wives’ share of housework in four family...

The variability of age at first marriage has implications for the destandardisation of life course and the deinstitutionalisation of the marriage institution. Previous studies, based on Western soc...

Late transition to parenthood is no longer a phenomenon only observed in Europe; rather, it is even more prominent in high-income and low-fertility East Asian societies. Yet, there is a significant...

Using census and survey data, this study documents the changes in household size and structure in the Philippines from 1990 to 2015 and explores how demographic and socioeconomic factors have playe...

Using longitudinal surveys on married Singaporean women of childbearing ages, we compared self-reported changes to fertility plans among 407 and 345 respondents after the 2016–2017 Zika and 2020 CO...

This paper highlights Professor Gavin Jones' seminal work on Asian divorce patterns, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia's Muslim communities. Beginning in the 1980s, Jones addressed the chal...

Gavin Jones’ professional career, from the 1960s to the 2020s, coincided with one of the most important periods of demographic change—the Asian fertility revolution. This article examines how his p...

Published in Asian Population Studies (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2024)

Professor Gavin W. Jones dedicated an impressive 58-year career to extensive research on various aspects of population and development in Asia. As a seasoned consultant, he was pivotal in shaping p...

West Bengal, a middle-ranking Indian state in terms of development indicators with more than two-thirds rural population, is on the verge of becoming a lowest low fertility zone. While the rural TF...

Hosting the FIFA World Cup was a pivotal moment for Qatar and the broader Arab region, attracting attention, tourism, and economic benefits. However, it also intensified global scrutiny of Qatar's ...

This study examines the question as to whether Pakistan’s fertility transition is stalling. The paper reviews the trajectories of fertility and its various determinants and compares Pakistan’s tren...

Published in Asian Population Studies (Vol. 20, No. 2, 2024)

Poverty exists not only in low and middle-income countries but also in high-income countries. Brunei, a rich country heavily reliant on hydrocarbon in Southeast Asia, is not an exception. Though po...

We advance research on the ‘gendered pandemic’ and its implications for psychological well-being in three important ways. First, we focus on Japan, arguably the most gender-inegalitarian wealthy co...

In this paper, we pay tribute to the late Emeritus Professor Gavin W. Jones and his outstanding contributions to the scholarship on marriage. Following a chronological assessment of his large body ...

Meeting for the first time in Jakarta in the early 1980s, Gavin Jones and I encountered a great mystery: how had decades of slow-growing, involuting cities in Asia suddenly become a new era of acce...

Published in Asian Population Studies (Vol. 19, No. 3, 2023)

Japan and South Korea are experiencing drastic declines in marriage rates. One of the main factors explaining these declines is deteriorating youth employment. This study examined the effects of yo...

ABSTRACT The SARS-CoV-2 virus (termed COVID-19) has raised the mortality trends and diminished life expectancy globally. The impact of COVID-19 on mortality. however, differs across population groups, times, and locations. The current study examines some aspects of COVID-19’s impact on mortality in Asia using published estimates of excess mortality. The estimates of excess mortality all showed higher

This study explores the provision of care for older persons in rural areas of ageing Indonesia. Using data from Ageing in Rural Indonesian Study, we examine who needs care, who provides care, and h...

Published in Asian Population Studies (Vol. 19, No. 2, 2023)

Social network members play a crucial role in shaping one’s health. Children can be considered the most proximal members of one’s social network; thus, the upward transmission of human capital from...

ABSTRACT The SARS-CoV-2 virus (termed COVID-19) raised the mortality trends and diminished life expectancy globally. This study analyzes the age-sex patterns of COVID-19 deaths in India during 2020–2021 and how the age-sex patterns have changed between 2020 and 2021. We calculated the losses in the male-female life expectancy at birth (LEB) induced due to the pandemic by projecting pre-pandemic mortality

Marriage is a key marker in the transition to adulthood across much of Asia. Globally, early marriages have declined, and marriage age has increased. This study examined changes in marriage timing ...

ABSTRACT Millions of lives in Asia were lost in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, causing a reduction of 1.66 years in life expectancy at birth (e0) in 2019–2021 and a reduction of 1.41 years in life expectancy at age 60 (e60). Using the World Population Prospects 2022, we decomposed mortality changes at older ages (ages 60+) that contributed to Asia’s reduction in e0 and e60. Overall, changes in mortality

ABSTRACT The benefits of having consistent and complete information on migration flows within, from and to Asia are numerous and worth the investment. They include a much better understanding of how migrants are responding to economic developments across Asia and how they are transforming both origin and destination societies. The challenges to producing international migration flow statistics in Asia

ABSTRACT Pakistan is the seventh largest contributor to world urban growth and exhibits high levels of urbanization. The recent 2017 Population Census results show a slowing of urban growth. We question whether this apparent slowdown reflects lowering of the rate of natural increase and migration, or is the result of a disconnect between the administrative definition of urban and actual reality. Alternative

ABSTRACT War exposure is a critical yet often ignored determinant of health in Asia. Cursory calculations suggest up to 80 per cent of Asians were alive at a point when a cumulatively intense war was ongoing in their country of current residence. As an example, data from Vietnam indicate that large proportions alive during past wars in that country experienced very traumatic and stressful events such

Published in Asian Population Studies (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2024)

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 socia...

ABSTRACT Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, has experienced a dramatic decline in fertility since 1985, with a decline in the total fertility rate from 5.5–2.1. International researchers have debated the reasons for this rapid decline, with some studies attributing it primarily to family planning programmes and others pointing at the simultaneous increase in the education of women and

ABSTRACT In pre-pandemic times, the labour migration regime in Asia based on principles of enforced transience is largely dependent on the ease and low cost of transnational mobility across national borders. Stalled mobility in COVID-19 times has both deepened the precarity that transient migrant workers face and also laid bare the unsustainability of the temporary migration for nation-states. At the

ABSTRACT The paper considers son preference effects оn actual fertility behaviour in Kyrgyzstan, a post-Soviet country of Central Asia. Using data from the DHS2012 and DHS1997, I argue that risks of transitions to parities from the second to the fifth are significantly higher among women with no sons. Furthermore, the relation of risks of parity progressions to sex composition of children already born

ABSTRACT This study estimates the impact of women’s college education on their fertility-related outcomes by taking advantage of a natural experiment known as the graduation quota program that massively expanded women’s opportunities to attend college in South Korea. After the 1979 military coup, the military regime in South Korea ordered all public and private colleges to expand their college admission

ABSTRACT 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

ABSTRACT 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

ABSTRACT Until the 1970s the Asia-born population of Australia remained small due to the racist White Australia Policy which denied entry to non-Europeans. Following its abolition in the early 1970s, Asian immigration progressively intensified, and in 2016 the Asia-born population of the country reached a total of 2.7 million, though the older population aged 65+ remained relatively small. This paper

ABSTRACT South Korea is the first country to shift from strong son preference to preferring daughters. This paper examines the factors associated with daughter preference, using data from the 2012 Korea General Social Survey, a nationally-representative survey of 1,379 people. The outcome variable was derived from the survey question, 'If you were to have one child, which one would you like to have

ABSTRACT Postponement of first births is a key cause of declining fertility rates, especially in East Asia where recovery from delayed childbearing has been weak. This paper investigates achievement of ideal ages at marriage and first birth in Singapore using survey data on 657 married women aged 25–34. Almost 50 per cent marry within one year of their ideal age, but less than 30 per cent have their

ABSTRACT Using data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (1998–2014), this study examines how various indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) (i.e. education, employment status, occupation, and earnings) are associated with the transition to first marriage for South Korean men and women. Results from discrete-time event-history analysis show that all SES indicators are strongly associated

(2021). Social stratification and family change in Japan and Korea. Asian Population Studies: Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 221-224.

ABSTRACT Across Asia, men and women increasingly delay or abstain from marriage, a change often linked to improvements in female educational attainment and labour force participation. In Myanmar, less than 90 per cent of women aged 45–49 years during the 2014 census had ever married, compared to nearly all men of a similar age. This paper investigates the difference in marriage patterns between males

ABSTRACT Marital exchange between origin ‘houses’ is central to Timorese narratives and has been a central concern of anthropological study of Portuguese Timor and independent Timor-Leste. This article challenges the notion of stable patterns of marital exchange between named houses across time. Drawing on data from the colonial census, this paper finds a severe imbalance in the sex ratio during the

ABSTRACT This study examines whether modernisation and demographic change explain subnational household variations in India using state-level data from six rounds of the National Sample Survey harmonised by IPUMS-International. Results highlight significant regional differences in living arrangements, mainly between south India, where joint households are rare, and selected states located in the Indo-Gangetic

ABSTRACT Subjective life expectancy predicts actual mortality and provides individual timeframes. This four-year longitudinal study on Korean baby boomers in middle age examines how subjective life expectancy changes as people get older and how changes in health and socioeconomic status cause these shifts. Compared to population-based actuarial life expectancies, men in their fifties overestimated

ABSTRACT Women's limited intra-household decision-making power has several dimensions: geographic, cultural, economic, and demographic. The dimension we focus on in this paper relates to women's transition into marriage. Marriages in India are near universal and age at marriage is low implying that nearly all women spend a large part of their lives in a marriage. However, little is known about the

All the three components of demographic change – births, deaths and migration – are deeply affected by pandemics. While deaths are the most obvious, pandemics leave an imprint, over the short and l...

ABSTRACT In crisis events such as wars, natural disasters and epidemics, migrant workers are among the hardest hit and most vulnerable to displacement, unemployment and the loss of income. The coronavirus pandemic has drawn attention to the role of sending states in protecting labour migrants during disruptions, particularly by returning them to countries of origin. This article highlights the understudied

ABSTRACT Despite the progress achieved in transformational development in socioeconomic domains, in Oman, like other Gulf Cooperation Council states, fertility rates are higher compared with those in other Middle East nations. Reproductive behaviour often varies geographically; consequently, analysing and modelling this phenomenon should be conducted at subnational and finer levels to capture spatial

Thailand is one of the most aged countries in Southeast Asia. In 2020, older persons (defined as aged 60 and over) have outnumbered children under age 15 for the first time in Thai history. There a...

ABSTRACT This study describes regional differences in the prevalence of functional difficulty among older persons in the Philippines. Using this measure, the study examines regional variation in disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) and investigates the factors associated with this variation. Data are drawn from the 2010 Philippine Census of Population and Housing and the 2010 Philippine regional

ABSTRACT This paper examines how delaying school start time to 9 o’clock affected the time use and health of secondary-school students in South Korea. To identify the causal effects of delaying school start time, we used a difference-in-differences methodology with two nationally representative datasets to take advantage of a unique natural experiment in South Korea. We found that the policy led students

ABSTRACT This study examines the roles of individual and household characteristics in internal migration in Indonesia for the first time using the five waves of Indonesia Family Life Survey. Our analysis extends previous research by using a longer period to capture mobility behaviour, by comparing changing of residence across three spatial scales, by incorporating the interaction of relation to household

ABSTRACT The Korean total fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world. This study assesses a broad range of factors associated with delayed first marriages, an important determinant of low fertility, using the Korean Population Census 2 per cent sample from 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010 and other data sources. Using a multivariate logistic regression, we examine the probability of ever being

ABSTRACT Existing research suggests that women spend a disproportionate amount of time on unpaid housework and childcare compared to men. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on unequal time burdens due to childcare among women. This study analyses the quantum of time poverty and multitasking behaviours of 3623 rural women with children of varying ages across rural North India. Findings show

ABSTRACT This paper examines the experiences of people displaced internally by climate-related factors in mainland Bangladesh, one of the world's most climate-vulnerable countries. The data derives from a representative survey of 1,200 households drawn equally from displacement-susceptible areas and areas without climate-related displacement. Comparisons are drawn on the basis of four variables: the