Population and policy challenges in East Asia

In China it is well known that the one child policy in urban area and 2+1 policy in rural region have been executed for a long time in order to control the population increase. forced abortions happened in many places of China, which cannot be accidental or just results of some personal behaviors. But it is indeed hard to explain from the demographic or sociology perspectives. Based on the materials collected from an in-depth interview study on the local government performance evaluation which conducted in Gansu province during July 2012, this paper tries to explain the occurrence of forced abortion and the local government’s dilemma in fulfilling its goal of family planning policy from the angle of public management. And suggests the main cause is the biased government performance evaluation system. According to the theories of government performance evaluation, the local family planning departments do not have public value oriented practice, which is rooted from the fault of inappropriate organizing model of the local government performance evaluation. The PV-GPG (Public Value-based Government Performance Governance) model is introduced to solve this issue and improve the current organizing mode.

Contractual mandatory retirement isdely practiced in Korean firms and wage workers have to leave their main life-time job in their early 50s on average. While her population and workforce are rapidly ageing, this involuntary early retirement system poses a serious challenge to individuals' old-age income security and sustainlable growth. In this paper, we analyze the labor market process of retirement and reemployment in an event-historic perspective. We use the KLIPS(Korea Labor and Income Panel Study) - a rich panel data set that contains individuals work history and their demographic characteristics. We estimate the effects of the individual, household, and job-level determinants on the rate and path of later- work life transition and discuss implications for labor market and social policy for an ageing society

Using data from a survey of four towns in Yi County of Anhui Province conducted in 2008, the paper analyzes older unmarried men’s expectations for their old age in rural China. It shows that marriage status is a significant determinant affecting expectations of support in old-age of rural men from perspectives of both birth cohort and migration experiences. Compared with married men, the older or never-migrated unmarried men are more likely to expect receiving the government aid and living in geracomium for old age, which is consistent with the hierarchical compensatory model that formal help becomes the last resort when the familial and non-familial sources of support are not available. Neither older unmarried men nor married men would see their siblings as their old-age supporters, and self-support by saving money or living alone become the important means in old-age expectations of the older unmarried men, especially for those who are relatively younger and ever-migrated.

Fertility level of a population is an aggregated outcome of individual’s fertility behaviors which are in turn determined by their fertility desire. There are substantial differences in understanding the relationship between fertility desire and fertility behavior. In order to describing the transition of fertility desire, fertility behavior and fertility level and examining the intriguing relationship between them in the context of low fertility, the paper presents empirical evidence from Shanghai, China, where that fertility level of the population has been at a very low level for a very long period.
Based on the results of several surveys in Shanghai since the early 1980’s, this paper describes and analyzes the transition of fertility desire in the past 30 years, with a focus on the desired number of children. The findings show that the desired number of children of people in Shanghai has been in the decreasing tendency, and the level is far below 2. The comparison between the desired number of children based on those surveys and total fertility rate in the corresponding years shows that the actual fertility level is lower than fertility desire expressed by the people in the surveys in Shanghai.

China has the world’s most stringent family planning policy with integrated, usually coercive approach to implement it. However, according to China’s 2005 National 1% Population Survey, the national rate of unauthorized births averaged at 18.6% over the last 20 years. How well has China's family planning policy worked? What are the causes for noncompliant fertility behaviors? This paper studies the patterns and determinants of unauthorized fertility behaviors in China from macro-, meso- and micro-perspectives using the 2005 population survey data and logistic regression analysis. Results show that the rate of unauthorized births differs considerably across China and between policy types. Rural one-child policy areas had the rate as high as 37.7%, contrasting to a rate of 12.6% in urban one-child policy areas. Strong son preference is the main and direct factor to bring about the resistance to birth control. While socioeconomic development contributes to quelling resistance to the family planning program, the relationship is not simply linear. Family income has a U-shape effect on the probability of unauthorized fertility behaviors, and many individual characteristics like education and age at first birth also have significant influence on the risk of unauthorized births. Theoretical and policy implications are also discussed.

One of the competing theories in the positive constitutional economics literature explaining peaceful extension of suffrage by elites (Voigt 2011) is that the elites weigh their own loss of franchise against the policies that are likely to be more favoured if franchise is extended. The objective of this paper is to directly test whether this “trade-off” exists by analyzing a survey of Japanese voters who were asked about their attitude to allowing parents to cast proxy votes on behalf of their children (referred to as Demeny Voting , DV) and policy preference. We examine whether the motivation of voters to support DV is related to their own policy priorities.

We find that the survey respondents who would not be eligible for extra votes, but who consider child-support as a priority are significantly more likely to support franchise extension. This suggests that elite voters whose policy priorities might be served by franchise extension, but whose own voting power would be diminished, nonetheless may favour an extension.

Our results are the first test of Demeny’s contention that franchise extension could advance pro-natal policies. Our results also offer direct support to the theoretical research which posits that peacable franchise extension might be motivated by policy priorities of voters.

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.

Understanding subjective life expectancy (SLE) is critical for pension policy design and longevity insurance markets. Yet there are very few studies that focus on this question. This paper is the first of its kind to analyse subjective life expectancy in rural China. It draws on a new national survey in which participants were asked at what age an average person might die. This was interpreted as requesting a personal estimate of life expectancy, an interpretation supported by gender and regional differences in reported values.
This paper statistically analyses the relationship between SLE and various demographic, social and economic factors. Current analysis focuses on two provinces, one rich and one poor. The results indicate that demographics and family relationships are more important than economic status in people’s perceptions of their life expectancy. We compare SLE with census-based life expectancy. Results suggest that both men and women over the age of 60 underestimate their life expectancy relative to national data. But while younger women also underestimate life expectancy, younger men over-estimate time to death relative to national estimates.

Over the past decades South Korea’s female labor force participation rates have increased, while its fertility decline has been dramatic. The family planning program implemented in 1962 is frequently argued to have initiated this fertility plunge. This study explores how women’s labor force participation is associated with second birth rates in South Korea; and how the family planning program among other factors may have contributed to this relationship. Event history analysis has been applied to longitudinal data. Results show that one-child mothers in the labor force has significantly lower second birth rates than homemakers, suggesting that labor force participation after first birth signals an interruption of a woman’s reproductive career. The second birth trend during the 1980s and 1990s partly developed in response to changes in the family planning program. The program abolishment in 1988 seems to have temporarily exhilarated second birth rates of homemakers, in particular.

China's family planning policy has to make a transformation, an important direction of which is to improve family development capacity. However, positive effects of current policy have also damaged greatly to families in mainland China through destroying their basic survival and sustainable ability, and causing failure to their self-development evenly. Therefore, to achieve goals of the social and family harmony and population control, the state should make the developmental family planning policy based on capacity building with doing some necessary adjustments.