Population and development in East Asia

This report is aimed at analyzing the policy challenges based on a questionnaire survey for experts to identify the risk factors of population development in China.
Population prediction shows that China will maintain a relatively low fertility level in the future, while the population size would increase steadily in the coming 20 years, accompanying with a continuous and rapid aging.
Fifty experts from different research fields are surveyed to discriminate the risk factors related to population development. It’s accepted by most of the experts that population size is no longer the prominent constraint on China’s economic and social development. Instead, structural problems are becoming more and more obvious. The most worrying concerns are the accelerating population aging, the worsening employment market, the unbalanced sex ratio at birth, the floating population in the process of rapid urbanization.
Policy challenges to population development are discussed, and related policy options are provided with focus on establishing comprehensive decision-making mechanism and promoting sustainable development.

Following the handover, Hong Kong started to have birthright citizenship to Chinese citizens which induced mainland Chinese citizen couples to cross the border to give birth in Hong Kong. From 2003, the young population in Hong Kong was much smaller than the total number of births. This was not because infant mortality increased sharply; it was because most of the children born by mainland Chinese citizen couples were not settling in Hong Kong after their birth. The gap between the number of births and actual young population directly affected the population and economic development in the future. Since Hong Kong had a very low total fertility rate more young population was needed to maintain the active of the society. Although there were a large number of mainland Chinese citizen couples born children who had granted the right of abode in Hong Kong, they did not help the economic development if they did not reside in Hong Kong. Thus, there was a necessary to rethink the population policy of Hong Kong and this paper aimed to discuss the population policy in Hong Kong towards the issue of mainland Chinese citizen couples’ cross border birth.

In this study, we examine effects of demographic change on trends in income inequality in Taiwan. Using data pooled from the Surveys of Family Income and Expenditure, we document trends in family income from 1981 to 2000 and decompose effects of the age, education, and marital status of household head, and household size in a quantile-regression counterfactual framework. Results show that age of household head is the major demographic factors contributing to rising income inequality. The effects of these demographic factors mainly come from changes in population composition, rather than changes in the structural return to these factors. In contrast to prior studies focusing on the demand-side of labor-market effects, our study demonstrates the importance of supply-side population composition.

This paper compares the relationship between socioeconomic status (wealth and education) and multiple dimensions of elderly well-being--disability, mobility, self-reported health status, memory, depression, and life satisfaction--in a middle-income country (China) and a high-income country (England) based on regression analysis that uses harmonized measurements from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) and the England Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Cross-country comparisons can help identify which relationships are universal and which depend on local contextualizing factors. We find that for physical health measures (self-reported health, ADLs/IADLs, mobility), wealth has stronger relationship in England than in China, with the poorest especially disadvantaged, but that the opposite is true for psychological health measures (life satisfaction, depression). It could be that in China current wealth is less correlated with lifetime wealth, which determines physical health, but that psychological health adapts more quickly to changes in socioeconomic status. We also find that education gradients are greater in China than in England for some measures (ADLs/IADLs, life satisfaction, memory), perhaps indicating that education is a stronger determinant of lifetime opportunities in China.

As globally 2.5 billion more people are going to be added by 2075 to current population and as 85% of these additions will be from developing countries with a very high proportion young population, it raises the concern that in future the destabilising effects of demographic changes could have a profound impact not only on national security but also global security. This concern has been echoed by United Nations in its report which mentions that societies currently in conflict or in post conflict transition, are facing a demographic challenge of extremely high proportion of young population at a time when people in these societies are still recovering from the scars of occupation, an economic slump, and periodic outbreaks of political violence. Timor-Leste, Asia’s newest nation characterised by exceptionally high fertility rates, extremely low formal sector employment and very limited international migration options, will generate very high proportions of excess labour. Analysis based on a combination of primary and secondary data this paper predicts that the unmet aspirations and building frustration of the youths may lead to re-emerging civil conflict as evident in the recent past unless the country utilise the widow of opportunity for a demographic dividend.

Using data from National Family Health Survey, NFHS-1(1992-93) and NFHS-3(2005-06), this paper examines linkages of socio-economic development and fertility change in Uttar Pradesh. The change in proximate determinants are measured among social and economic groups while fertility change is measured with respect to total fertility rate(TFR). Results indicate that level of fertility has declined among all social and economic groups, however decline is more among women from urban areas, belonging to rich household and those with high education. Among proximate determinants, reductions in fertility are less reflected with increase in age at marriage and Post-partum Amenorrhea but more by increase in contraception. It highlight that women belonging to low socio-economic groups are increasingly adopting contraception and contributing to fertility transition despite their social and economic backwardness. It was established that there were wide variations in the degree of influence of the socio-economic factors that operate through proximate determinants in influencing fertility. The most influencing variables are education, religion and residence. It is recommended that promotion of contraceptive use, female education and general reproductive and child health care utilization are important if fertility in Uttar Pradesh is to decrease.

Given high population sex ratio for 60 years since China’s first population census in 1953 and skewed sex ratio at birth for 30 years, we review the determinants and expose the new patterns of gender imbalance in China. Using censuses data from 1982 to 2010, we adopt demographic method to decompose the population sex ratio into three factors --- population age structure, sex differential in mortality, sex ratio at birth. The results indicate that sex differential in mortality had little influence on high population sex ratio and started to decline the population sex ratio by 0.65 since 2000. The rapid aging of population age structure takes the main effect on declining population sex ratio, competing with the skewed sex ratio at birth which becomes the leverage to raise the population sex ratio in contemporary China. We also evaluate the quality of census data by comparing models with and without the effects of sex-selective underreporting, the under-enumerate of girls in census data is confirmed. Finally, we focus on the new trend of sex ratio at birth --- shifting pattern of sex-selection at birth, and approve that the decline in sex-selection at second birth fully offset by the increase in sex-selection at first birth, given the sex ratio at birth rising from 116.9 in 2000 to117.9 in 2010.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the population of Japan began to decline, after reaching its peak of 128 million with the highest proportion of the elderly in the world. As witnessed its drastic shift to a new population regime, here we introduce the new concept of “post-demographic transitional phase” for Japan. In this paper, first, we give a characterization of the “post-demographic transitional phase,” rethinking classical theories of demographic transition. Second, we examine demographic indicators which show when and how Japan entered this new era, concluding that the shift occurred between the middle of the 1970s and the late 2000s as a process of inescapable event chain. Third, we illustrate that this shift is closely associated with the socioeconomic, cultural and even political changes prominent in its recent history. We are now faced with many difficult problems such as a rise in underemployment associating with marriage squeeze among youths, an increase in poor single households particularly among the elderly, and economic downturns and fears of a financial crisis at the national level. The study of the post-demographic transition of Japan from both theoretical and empirical aspects is imperative because the other Asian countries seem to follow the same dynamics.

The new generation of migrant workers, who is currently in the key stage of adapting to flow-in area, has become a social group that cannot be ignored in China cities. This paper aims at finding out the social adaption situation of the new generation of migrant workers in China’s urbanization progress,.
The data is from New Generation of Migrant Workers Research (2011) conduced in January 2011. The research studies 1201 migrant workers from 24 provinces or cities in China by questionnaire and in-depth interview.
To establish the social adaption level, the author set the index of social adaption with the new generation migrant workers. The index system includes three classes, which is about 5 points: assimilation ability, identity recognition, social acceptation, fairness of adaption, and home-leaving.According to the research, Chinese new generation migrant workers have reached 51% overall. In the aspect of self-evaluation, with the situation of leaving-hometown and the fairness of adaption is higher, while the assimilation ability and identity recognition level is lower, self-recognition element of social acceptation is medium. Select personal characteristics, family characteristics, as well as social capital & human capital as the three different variables to explore the influences according to Logistic Regression.

We present data from the 2010 Revision of the World Population Prospects on old age mortality in terms of life expectancy at age 65, age-specific death rates for 13 countries/territories in the region (Cambodia, China, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam) from 1995 to 2010, and data from the WHO on cause-of-death for six countries (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore and Thailand) from 1980 to 2010. While mortality transitions in these populations took place in different times and under different political systems, levels of socioeconomic development and living environment, changes in their age patterns and sex differentials in mortality have shown certain similarities: women witnessed a greater decline than men and young elders had a larger decline than the oldest-old. In all six countries examined for cause-of-death except Thailand, most of the increases in life expectancy at age 65 in both men and women were attributable to declines in mortality from stroke and heart diseases. The findings shed light on the relationship between epidemiological transition, changing age patterns of mortality and improving life expectancy in these populations.