On women and fertility, briefly

Thinking about Demography Matters and International Women's Day, I realized that almost all of my blogging here on fertility issues, at least the blogging that relates to the incentives and disincentives, relates to the choices of women. This makes a certain amount of sense since it's ultimately women who are essential in reproduction--not biologically, true, but socially. Single motherhood is more common than single fatherhood, at least in contemporary Western societies, for a reason.

This is not going to be a very long post at all. Consider it a brief note, to myself as much as to you. What are the hidden assumptions in the relationship between gender--female gender, male gender--and demographic outcomes? What things get missed?

Some thoughts on the demographics of Japan and path dependency

I learned from any number of sources, from E-mails and from blogs and from the "News" section of my Feedly news feed, that the demographics of Japan have entered a new phase. The population is now in sharp decline. From the CBC:

Japan's latest census confirmed the hard reality long ago signalled by shuttered shops and abandoned villages across the country: the population is shrinking.

Japan's population stood at 127.1 million last fall, down 0.7 per cent from 128.1 million in 2010, according to results of the 2015 census, released Friday. The 947,000 decline in the population in the last five years was the first since the once-every-five-years count started in 1920.

Unable to count on a growing market and labour force to power economic expansion, the government has drawn up urgent measures to counter the falling birth rate.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made preventing a decline below 100 million a top priority. But population experts say it would be virtually impossible to prevent that even if the birth rate rose to Abe's target of 1.8 children per woman from the current birthrate of 1.4.

Without a substantial increase in the birthrate or loosening of staunch Japanese resistance to immigration, the population is forecast to fall to about 108 million by 2050 and to 87 million by 2060.

Bloomberg went into more detail.

Tokyo, Japan’s capital, had the highest municipal population with 13.5 million. The city also recorded the biggest increase in population after Okinawa prefecture. Osaka, the country’s second biggest city, is among 39 prefectures and cities that had a decline in population.

The ratio of Japan’s 1,719 municipalities that had a drop in population expanded to 82 percent in 2015, from 77 percent in 2010. The number of households rose 2.8 percent to 53.4 million with the number of people per household dropping to 2.38 from 2.46 over the five-year period.

Statistics Japan's latest estimates estimate a decline of nearly 200 thousand people between the 1st of September, 2015, and the 1st of February of this year. This Japanese-language PDF apparently goes into more detail about the particulars.

Tokyo, the reports note, continues to grow on the balance of net migration, but away from Tokyo decay is real. I would again like to recommend to our readers Tokyo-based blogger Richard Hendy's sadly inactive blog Spike Japan, a compilation of tours throughout different Japanese regions which have entered terminal or near-terminal declines, something that he plausibly enough blames on demographics. With fertility rates far below replacement levels, large-scale migration of the young out of declining areas, the rapid aging of the remaining population, and next to no foreign immigration, it's difficult to imagine how some peripheral areas could ever be revived.

It's increasingly difficult to imagine how Japan as a whole will revive. Jacob M. Schlesinger's November 2015 Wall Street Journal "Tokyo’s Test: Policy vs. Demographics" noted the challenge for the country.

In May 2012, [Masaaki Shirakawa, the governor of the Bank of Japan from 2008 through 2013] delivered a widely cited speech titled “Demographic Changes and Macroeconomic Performance: Japanese Experiences.” In it, he cited global evidence that “the population growth rate and inflation correlate positively,” a finding he called “a sharp contrast with the recently waning correlation between money growth and inflation.” In other words, a country like Japan with a shrinking population was inevitably condemned to slow growth and deflation, and central banks were impotent to fight it.

[. . .]

Just over two and a half years into his term, [new Abenomics-era governor Haruhiko Kuroda] has delivered well on the first pledge, with two rounds of “quantitative and qualitative easing” that more than doubled the BOJ’s asset-purchase plan used to create fresh liquidity. The jury is still out on his second pledge, to end deflation and revive Japan’s economy.

The bad news: Japan’s gross domestic product contracted for the two consecutive quarters ended Sept. 30, pushing the country into recession for the second time during Mr. Kuroda’s brief term. Some of that results from cyclical problems and policy missteps outside Mr. Kuroda’s control: the slowdown in China, an ill-timed sales tax hike. But some stems from the fact that economy’s capacity to expand is constrained when the workforce is shrinking, making recessions much more common.

The battle to break deflation has also struggled, due both to falling oil prices and the slow growth that has damped price pressures. After some early success in pushing the most closely watched inflation gauge above 1%, deflation returned over the summer, and the Japanese government reported Friday that the consumer-price index was negative in October for the third month in a row.

But the BOJ released Friday its own preferred measure—stripping out prices for food, energy and other items that the central bank considers distorting of underlying trends—that showed inflation rising in October at a more robust positive 1.2% annual rate. The aggressive monetary policy has also helped create the tightest job market in a generation, with a separate Friday report showing the unemployment rate dropping to an eye-popping 3.1%. That, in turn, has helped expand the labor market by prompting employers to find more ways to use older workers conventionally considered past retirement age. The jump in employment in Japan by those 65 years and older has kept the size of its labor force fairly stable, even as the classically defined “working-age population” has contracted. Whether Japan’s newly aggressive monetary policy can really overcome the demographic drag hinges on whether Japanese companies can be persuaded to invest more at home. An economy’s ability to grow is rooted in the expansion of its labor force, combined with the ability to boost its labor productivity, or output per worker. Productivity can be lifted by investment in labor-enhancing equipment.

Could this investment be enough? It depends, Schlesinger concludes, on the Japanese government being able to successfully alter the perceptions of business about the dire business environment. Whether or not this is achievable, particularly in the context of Japan's increasingly adverse demographics, is another issue entirely. Yes, it's possible that Japan might successfully implement a partial roboticization of its economy to cope this these challenges. Whether the technological improvements necessary will arrive in time is another question entirely.

How is Japan dealing with its demographics issues? Not very well. See Isabel Reynolds' October 2015 report noting that Abe's proposed policies for dealing with Japan's demographic issues have not been successful: substantial immigration remains impossible, child care and elderly care programs are not funded to meet the demand, women and especially mothers have substantial problems in the work force, Japan's population continues to drift towards Tokyo Metropolis. A scandal recently erupted over paternity leave, when parliamentarian Kenzuke Miyazaki was criticized for taking paternity leave and then resigned following revelations of an affair. Traditional gender norms seem to still be in effect, removing any possibility of change, certainly any hope of the Nordic-like near-replacement fertility wanted by Abe. Japan's immigration policies, as the report of Bloomberg's Yoshiaki Nohara and Jie Ma about Japan's much-criticized foreign-technical internship program illustrates, remain exploitative, and seem likely to deter immigration.

Back in 2010, Hendy wondered if Japan was stuck in a downwards spiral.

It might just be, however, that despite recent evidence to the contrary, Japan has embarked on a vicious demographic spiral, in which a variety of complex feedback mechanisms set to work: aging results in declining international competitiveness, which results in greater economic hardship at home, which results in a suppressed birthrate; aging results in ballooning fiscal deficits, which in the absence of debt issuance must result in higher taxes or cuts to government spending, which cause economic pain, driving down the birthrate; aging, as the elderly dissave, results in a decline in the pool of domestic savings on which government borrowing is an implied claim, reducing room for fiscal maneuver and resulting in less ability to withstand exogenous shocks; aging further entrenches conservative attitudes to everything from pension reform to immigration, resulting in greater government outlays and smaller government receipts; aging leads the electorate to fear for the future of the pension system, resulting in more saving by the economically active, depressing consumption, which drives manufacturers offshore and raises unemployment, which is strongly correlated with the birthrate.

I would argue that we are seeing just this sort of thing. Certainly the downward demographic spiral is continuing, with inadequate signs as of yet that Japan is going to be making the cultural and institutional changes needed to foster a revival in fertility rates. The new normal in Japan might well be low overall fertility, some people having only small families, some opting not to have children together.

Even if there was a miraculous revival tomorrow to replacement-level fertility, there would still be a huge trough in Japanese demographics, a lack of potential workers and consumers, that could only be plausibly filled by immigration. There, too, Japan is lacking. I have blogged here about the example of South Korea, where the total stock of foreign-born residents is not only comparable to that of Japan despite South Korea's population being only 40% of the size, but where the national government is actively encouraging immigration. Would radical change be enough? Japan could have been a destination for migration flows for some time--I remember reading in the English translation of Robert Guillain's The Japanese Challenge about how some industrialists wanted to bring in Taiwanese guest workers as early as the 1960s--but Japan has explicitly chosen to deter migration. In this context, networks of migrants and migration have formed without Japan, potentially leaving it outside. Might Japan open the doors and find out that the people who might otherwise have come to Japan opted for the more familiar Korea, or China, or who knows where else instead? It's possible.

How can Japan escape its demographic trap, break from its existing path? I straightforwardly admit bafflement. I only hope that the people running one of the world's largest economies will do better than me.

Two news articles on the demographic exception that is France

Tonight I thought I'd share two links to English-language articles taking a look at the demographic exception that is France, specifically to a period TFR now somewhat higher than the United States'.

The first is Noah Smith's Bloomberg View article "Fixing America's Baby Bust". In this article, the United States is contrasted negatively with France.

What is France’s secret sauce? It helps to think about the reasons that it’s so hard to raise a family in a developed country. Raising a kid costs huge amounts of money. First of all, you probably have to get a bigger house. Food and transportation are big expenses. Health care, including extras like braces, takes a big bite. And then there’s college, which is becoming out of reach for more and more families.

But the biggest cost of raising a child may simply be time. Time that you spend taking care of the kids is time that you don’t spend at work earning money. In the ideal situation, both parents would have flexible work situations, and both would take time off to share child-care duties. Unfortunately, most of us don’t live that dream. Many have rigid work schedules, and often put in many extra hours at home or at the office -- Americans work longer hours than almost anyone in the developed world. And many are single parents. What that means is that a lot of American parents are forced to make an all-or-nothing choice between the workplace and child care.

The demanding U.S. workplace may also be preventing women from fully joining the workforce. French women don’t just have more babies than American women, they also are more likely to get a job. The U.S., which was a leader in female labor force participation in the 1990s, has fallen behind. These days, even Japanese women are more likely to work than their American counterparts.

The second, longer article is over at The Guardian, Anne Chemin's "France’s baby boom secret: get women into work and ditch rigid family norms". Drawing heavily on interviewers with French demographers, it makes the argument that polities and cultures which exhibit greater flexibility around the idea of what a family could be are likely to see greater rates of family formation and reproduction than their more rigid counterparts.

[T]here is nothing mysterious about the approach that is working in both France and Scandinavia. It combines the idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies. “Nowadays, both ingredients are needed to sustain the population,” Lesthaeghe asserts. “At first sight it seems a simple recipe, but it’s far from easy to put into practice: it takes a lot of time to design and establish a new family model.”

There is nothing straightforward or natural about “the family”. It is a very complex world based on social norms, what the American sociologist Ronald Rindfuss calls the “family package”. “In Japan, for instance, this package involves many constraints,” says Ined demographer Laurent Toulemon. “A woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible: one doesn’t have to get married or have children. Norms are more open and families more diverse.”

Most countries in southern Europe are based on something akin to the Japanese package, with fairly rigid family norms in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Greece. There is social pressure on women not to work while their children are still young, just as it is ill-thought of to live with someone or have a baby outside wedlock. In all these countries the proportion of births outside marriage is below 30%, whereas in France, Sweden and Norway it exceeds 50%. In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.

The picture is very different in Scandinavia and France. “In these countries the family norm is much more flexible, with late marriages, reconstituted families, single parents, much more frequent births outside marriage and divorces than further south,” Toulemon adds. “People are far less concerned about the outlook for the family [as an institution].” The positive impact of this open-ended approach to families on fertility is borne out by the statistics, at more than 1.8 children per woman in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France.

The principle of gender equality and the necessary corollary of women being free to work are the key factors in this family model that emerged at the end of the 20th century. Yet in the 1960s-70s advocates of traditional family values claimed that the birthrate would be the first thing to suffer from this trend. Fifty years on it seems they were mistaken: fertility in Europe is higher in countries where women go out to work, lower in those where they generally stay at home. “Women’s freedom of decision is essential to this system,” Toulemon asserts.

The underlying theme of both of these articles is the question of whether or not what we might call the Franco-Nordic model can be copied easily, to other European countries, to high-income East Asia (Chemin specifically mentions Japan and South Korea), and beyond. An additional, interesting, question is whether or not this would make a difference. Even if Germany did switch tomorrow to the high-fertility French model, there would still be much demographic momentum tending towards poulation decline needing to be overcome. Thoughts?

"A story of drinkers, genocide and unborn girls"

I wanted to briefly note that, over at Quartz, David Bauer has an interactive essay taking a look at the different factors in different areas of the world which lead to widely varying sex ratios. Female-selective abortion, male-heavy migration, changing patterns of life expectancy, demographic trends in the BRICs versus ost-Communist countries versus high-income countries--it's all there.

On potentially unsustainable immigration in Singapore

The demographic structure of Singapore, is characterized equally by a very low fertility rate among the population of Singaporean citizens and a very high rate of immigration, has become a major political issue in Singapore. An very open immigration policy that implements the principles of replacement migration in their purest form is politically unpopular.

Singapore, which is boosting infrastructure to accommodate a population of 6.9 million by 2030, said the number of people in the city state will be “significantly” lower than what it is planning for.

The government won’t decide on a population trajectory beyond 2020, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in Parliament yesterday as lawmakers from his ruling party endorsed a white paper that outlined proposals including allowing more foreigners into the country to boost the workforce. Opposition members rejected the motion, saying immigration as a policy to spur economic growth is not sustainable.

Record-high housing and transport costs, public discontent over an influx of foreigners and infrastructure strains in the country of 5.3 million people are weakening approval for Lee’s party. Singaporeans are planning a protest next week against the government’s population projections for 2030, which could see citizens, including new ones, making up only one of every two people on the island smaller in size than New York City.

“We will track and control the number of non-Singaporeans and the inflow of immigrants so that we are not overhauled just by the sheer flood of people coming in,” Lee said. “We are not deciding on a population of 6.9 million for 2030 now.”

Lee’s administration is under pressure to placate voters without disrupting the entry of talent and labor that helped forge the only advanced economy in Southeast Asia. His party lost two by-elections after returning to power in May 2011 with the lowest share of the popular vote since independence in 1965.

Much of the public opinion I've come across is hostile. This expatriate blogger and this Singaporean blogger, for instance, each favour letting the Singaporean population age and eventually decline, if it helps prevent a deteriorating quality of life for Singaporeans. The dramatic consequences of very low fertility in Singapore don't seem to matter. (An April 2012 government presentation suggests that, at current birth rates and without increasing citizen numbers through naturalization, the Singaporean citizen population will start experiencing negative decrease around 2025. This seems about right.)

What are the reasons for low fertility in Singapore? Numerous papers--"Below-Replacement Fertility in East and Southeast Asia: Consequences and Policy Responses" by Gubhaju and Moriki-Durand, published in 2003 in the Journal of Population Research; the 2011 paper "The Determinants of Low Fertility in Singapore: Evidence From a Household Survey" by Hashmi and Mok; the East-West Centre's May 2010 paper "Very Low Fertility in Asia: Is There a Problem? Can It Be Solved?" by Westley, Choe, and Retherford--trace the causes for very low fertility in Singapore, as elsewhere in high-income East Asia, to contradictions between the policies which promote high economic growth and policies which promote marriage and family formation, and conservative norms for women in families and as mothers which encourage many women to postpone marriage. As a consequence, marriage rates have dropped while non-marital fertility remains low. (The two factors seem of comparable importance.) In the context of a very competitive economic environment made increasingly more so by deregulated labour market and immigration, it makes sense for individuals to postpone family formation and instead work on accumulatng the capital necessary to live. These are compounded by the very high cost of living in an increasingly densely-populated Singapore, and the economic cost associated with parenthood.

Gavin Jones' paper "Late marriage and low fertility in Singapore: the limits of policy", published in May 2012 in The Japanese Journal of Population, makes the point that--to a certain extent--Singapore's three decades of heavy government involvement in fertility, starting in the 1980s with relatively crude baby bonuses but proceeding to increasingly sophisticated schemes for government childcare and paid parental leave, may have helped keep fertility high. Recorded fertility in mostly-Chinese Singapore may be lower than that of the Chinese living in the Malaysia that Singapore was once part of--the Malaysian situation was profiled here at Demography Matters in 2009 (1, 2)--but it's higher than that of other East Asian cities.

Comparison[s] with low-fertility East Asian countries [raise] some interesting observations. First, Singapore’s fertility is in the same league as these countries, though it has never gone as low as recent figures for Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. Bearing in mind, however, that Singapore is a city-state, comparisons with other cities in the region are appropriate. When this is done, we find that Singapore’s fertility rate is approximately 15% to 50% higher than in cities including Tokyo, Seoul, Busan, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, and Hong Kong [. . .] There may be some elements of policy in Singapore that are partly responsible for these differences. Second, fertility differs substantially among the different ethnic groups in Singapore. Malay fertility is substantially higher, and Chinese fertility lower, than the average. However, given the three fourths weighting of Chinese in the resident population, the overall fertility level is heavily influenced by the fertility of Chinese Singaporeans (whose TFR fell to a historic low of 1.08 in 2009). Malay fertility rose substantially for some time after being the first Muslim population in the world to reach replacement level fertility in 1976, but it has recently fallen sharply to reach its 2009 TFR level of 1.8.

[. . .]

Fertility has not responded as hoped, and this may well reflect the fact that the baby bonuses and tax concessions for children are not substantial enough to make much of a dent in the high monetary costs of raising children. Moreover, the culture in many Singapore workplaces remains unfriendly to those who prioritise family over responsibilities to the firm, and this discourages women from having a child that may hurt their career prospects and relationships with workmates. Nevertheless, it could well be that Singapore’s more comprehensive policies to support marriage and childbearing go a long way towards explaining why fertility rates in Singapore, though disappointingly low from the perspective of the Singapore government, are higher than in other major cities in the region, as noted earlier.

Granted that it's unlikely that the Singaporean government can do anything about the high cost of living in Singapore, or that it will be able to enact anything more than slow change in the cultural norms which keep fertility rates low, skepticism about the results of the latest government push seems justified.

"My mother-in-law hates me and she says I'm selfish, but I don't really care," says [Penelope] Sim, a human resources consultant who's been married for six years. "Everything's crazy expensive and life's already stressful enough here without children. If there's no one to carry on the family name, then so be it."

Sim, 33, embodies Lee's challenge to persuade Singaporeans to wed younger. While the birth rate was about 1.3 children per woman in 2012 - barely enough to replace one parent - a backlash against soaring immigration forced the government to curb the influx of foreigners, leading to labour shortages and slower economic growth.

Measures since 1987 to reverse declining fertility, including handouts of as much as S$18,000 (HK$113,600) and extended maternity leave, haven't worked. The nation's birthrate in 2010 and 2011 were the lowest in 47 years of independence. About 36,000 babies were born to residents in 2011, compared to nearly 50,000 in 1990.

The failure to encourage more births means the country will face a shrinking pool of workers and consumers - a deterrent to investment. It will also increase the burden on younger employees to pay for an ageing population. Lee says higher taxes will be needed in the next two decades as the government boosts social spending to support the elderly.

Measures released on January 21 on a government website called "Hey Baby", include boosting Singapore's annual budget on marriage and parenthood to S$2 billion from S$1.6 billion, including spending on matchmaking, housing grants, childcare and fertility treatments and cash gifts for babies. In 2001, the budget was S$500 million.

The prime minister, who has four children, is encouraging couples to start a family earlier by giving priority public housing to those with children below 16 years of age. With some of the most expensive real estate in Asia, government-subsidised homes are the only affordable option for most young couples, and waiting lists for new apartments can extend years. The government will make a S$3,000 contribution to childhood medical expenses and last week announced measures to make childcare more affordable.

Is immigration the answer? In the short term, it may be, but as Mukul G. Asher noted in 2008--see this short presentation that was expanded in this paper--Singapore will be competing for immigrants with other destinations, many of which may do a better job of reconciling economic and family needs. The fertility of new Singaporeans is likely to converge with the old. In the medium term, unless unrealistically large numbers of immigrants come to Singapore, the population is still going to age spectacularly. In the long term, a bigger problem may be created. (The conclusion of the South Korean segment of the United Nations' report on replacement migration that, in order to keep potential support ratios at the level of 1995 given prevailing fertility, 5.1 billion people would need to immigrate by 2050 comes to mind.) William Pesek, below, may be right to call this "the human equivalent of what Bernard Madoff did with money", “Ponzi demography.”

All this leaves aside the issue of whether or not immigration on the scale envisaged by the Singaporean government is going to be popular, or even politically possible; authoritarian though Singapore might be, it's still a parliamentary state with elections. Clinging to an economic model requiring politically unsustainable--perhaps physically unsustainable, given Singapore's small size--level of immigration brings to mind Paul Krugman's argument that high economic growth in East Asia, especially Singapore, was the consequence less of productivity growth and more by inputs of labour and capital. At some point, something will have to give. William Pesek's Bloomberg News opinion piece, "Singapore's Population Bubble", highlights the potential fragility of the current political consensus.

The signs of overcrowding and urban stress are palpable to any visitor. Prices are surging, public services in a nation famed for nanny-state tendencies are slipping and some of the finest infrastructure anywhere is bucking under the strain. Locals blame the influx of immigrants, which Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ruling party touts as one key to Singapore’s success in the years to come.

The city-state, with about half the area of New York City, has 3.3 million citizens and 2 million foreign residents, many of whom have contributed greatly to Singapore’s growth in finance and construction. Yet complaints that overseas workers deprive locals of jobs and drive up housing prices fill the air. Singapore is the third-most-expensive Asian city and ranks as the sixth most costly in the world, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit ranking of 131 cities.

[. . .]

Sadly, some of the rants one reads in the media and online veer toward xenophobia. If Singaporeans are so livid, they should stop supporting Lee’s party. After all, isn’t the government, by seeking to import more human capital, telling its own people that they lack the skills to compete? Anyone who doubts Singapore is serious only has to look at accelerating efforts to reclaim land from the sea for development, giving the city the room for population growth.
[. . .]
Singapore needs to find another way. The era of easy growth is over. Just as economies such as Japan and South Korea are seeing the limits of their export-led models, Singapore’s formula has run its course. Raising the productivity of its current workforce would be more potent for a developed, open economy looking to compete in a region dominated by the cheap labor and manufacturing of China and India. Singapore should focus as much energy on incentives for its existing residents to innovate and start new businesses as on adding more bodies.

On sex selection in Ontario

The new Canadian Medical Association Journal paper "Sex ratios among Canadian liveborn infants of mothers from different countries", by Ray, Henry, and Urquia got quite a bit of attention from the Canadian press today. Sex-selective abortions may be occurring among some immigrant communities in ontario.

Women born in India and living in Canada are slightly more likely to have male children than other mothers living in this country, raising the possibility of sex-selective abortions.

But the researchers warn that without any evidence documenting this trend, it’s impossible to conclude that female feticide is the only explanation.

“We need more data … or we have the risk of committing a wrong by filling in the blanks that need to be filled in by data, not assumptions,” said Joel Ray, lead author of the study and a physician and scientist at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital who focuses on obstetrical medicine.

Researchers looked at data for all single (not twins or triplets) live births that took place in Ontario from 2002 to 2007 and categorized mothers based on their country of origin.

They found the ratio of male to female births was even for all women except those from India and South Korea. Women from those countries who had one prior child were much more likely to give birth to a boy. But the trend was much more noticeable for Indian-born mothers with two or more prior children.

The “normal” male to female birth ratio is considered to be 1.05. But the ratio for South Korean- and Indian-born women with one prior child at the time of delivery was 1.20 and 1.11, respectively. For Indian-born women with two children at the time of delivery, the ratio was 1.36, which dropped slightly to 1.25 if the woman had three or more children at the time of delivery.

A couple of ancillary news items have since appeared highlighting this--a Toronto Star report that some hospitals in communities with large South Asian populations, a CBC article describing how an American reproductive clinic has been advertising sex-selection services in an Indo-Canadian newspaper--and the press coverage has, creditably, emphasized the preliminary nature of the conclusions that sex selection is ongoing.

Ray acknowledged that there are gaps in his research — he could not determine the ethnicities of the Canadian-born mothers, for example, and his study also did not examine statistics around abortions, a focus Ray plans on pursuing next.

But the study’s greatest weakness is failing to determine the genders of the women’s previous children, said Prabhat Jha, chair of Disease Control at the University of Toronto. He also works at St. Michael’s Hospital as director of the Centre for Global Health Research.

“To really understand what these stats are, you have to understand what was the gender of the previous children in the family,” said Jha, who has done extensive research on female feticide in India.

“Selection happens at higher birth orders, which means you let nature decide the first child and if you have a girl, then a small number of homes say, ‘Well, we want a boy.’ That’s when they turn to sex-selective abortion.”

Even if this latest study proves that female feticide is happening in Ontario, it would reveal that it is occurring in very small numbers, Jha said.

Using the study’s findings, Jha calculated that there were about 245 “missing girls” for Indian-born mothers with at least two prior children — that’s less than one per cent of the 31,963 babies born to Indian women between 2002 and 2007.

“Important but subtle biases, such as higher migration of women who are about to give birth to a son might well explain this finding and suggest that selective abortion is not the explanation,” Jha said.

The implications of this finding are multiple--Jonathan Kay, writing in the National Post, may be right to expect an impact on Canadian regulation of abortion, for instance. The effects of sustained sex selection on the immigrant communities in question, if it is ongoing, will also be serious: among other things, if young men born into these ethnic communities lack partners in Canada, then either exogamy or the immigration of women from their countries of origin will become more appealing possibilities than celibacy. The impacts of sex-selection abortion on immigration, further, may make immigration unpopular; if immigrants could be framed as viscerally misogynistic, exclusionism could become popular.

Three demographics-themed links in the blogosphere

I thought I'd share with our readers three interesting links from the blogosphere.

1. Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston--driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts' institutes of education as Brazil tries to improve its workforce's skill levels--could serve Boston quite well relative to other American cities.

Demography Matters has touched on Brazil before, both as a source of immigrants and as a destination. Back in 2009, I'd even linked to an article on Brazilian migration to New England (building substantially on the links of other Lusophone immigrant-sending countries, including Portugal and Cape Verde, to the region) that made the point that, as the American economy declined and the Brazilian economy grew, migration was starting to become circular; Brazilians weren't moving to the United States to look for a new life abroad, but rather to accumulate capital that could be taken back to the homeland. As a commentor notes at Burgh Diaspora, will the increased volume of temporary migration from Brazil to New England result in strong linkages between the longest-settled region of the United States and one of the rising BRICs? If Brazilians assimilate quickly and/or maintain few links with Boston and New England, that's open to question.

2. Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn't much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in a Siberia that has traditionally had more balanced sex ratios than European Russia going back at least a century.

Neither Russia’s female bias nor the higher sex ratio in Siberia than in the European Russia are new. A preponderance of women has been observed since the first modern census of 1897, when Russian Empire had the average of 94.52 males per 100 females. [. . . T]he female bias has been observed in all population groups in all censuses except for the urban population in 1897. The much higher urban sex ratio at the time, 112.99 males per 100 females, stemmed from the fast-paced urbanization and industrialization of the country, with more men than women moving from villages into cities and joining the factory-working proletariat. During the early Soviet period, the female bias grew and the sex ratio went down to 90.25 in 1926 and 89.21 in 1939, as Stalin-era collectivization and purges impacted men much more than women. The peak in the female bias is evident in the first post-World War II census of 1959: the sex ratio had plummeted to just 80.45 males per 100 females, lower than in any Russian region today. Although the female bias has since gone down, it has not yet attained the prewar level.

According to Elizabeth Brainerd of the Economics Department of Williams College, the peak in the female bias in 1959 is due to the devastating Soviet population losses during World War II, currently estimated at 27 million or nearly 14% of the prewar population. These losses, Brainerd shows, disproportionately affected young men, significantly influencing marriages, fertility, and health among both men and women in the postwar period. Crucially, however, wartime demographic decline affected the European part of Russia much more than Siberia. A large part of the western Russia (as well as Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states) was under Nazi occupation (see map on the left). While many women and children were evacuated from the occupied zone, most men either stayed behind or were shipped to the front. The military units stationed in the European part of the Soviet Union took a huge hit during the early months of the war. Massive disorganization led to extraordinarily high casualty figures, with the survivors either fleeing to the east or becoming prisoners of war, an experience that few survived. Siberian military units – which included 400,000 men, 5,000 guns, more than 3,000 tanks – were shifted to the Soviet Union’s Western front only in the late fall of 1941, after Stalin became assured that the Japanese would not attack the Russian Far East. These Siberian units were instrumental in the Red Army’s first counteroffensive at the gates of Moscow and later in turning the tide of war in the streets of Stalingrad. Trained as children to hunt and shoot, Siberians were a force to be reckoned with. “The Siberian… is tougher and stronger and possesses considerably more capacity to resist than his European countrymen,” the Chief of Staff of Germany’s Fourth Army reported ruefully at the time of their retreated from Moscow (quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln’s The Conquest of a Continent. Siberia and the Russians, p. 362). More importantly, Siberian units received better direction from the top of the Soviet military command, which resulted in lower – if still enormous – casualties.

Overall, a higher proportion of Siberian men survived the war than those of European Russia. The factories that were relocated to the Urals and beyond during the war, as well as the growing exploration and exploitation of natural resources in the post-war period, attracted even more men to the east. As a result “marriages” (legal or otherwise) between ‘white’ men and indigenous women became common. This higher wartime survival rate of men in Siberia, along with the post-war influx of men into the region, also had a positive effect on the second-generation (and perhaps beyond). As Brainerd shows, boys born to women in areas of higher sex ratios (Siberia) attain better health and nutritional status than boys born to women in areas of lower sex ratios (European Russia). This interesting finding suggests that sex ratios are to a degree a self-perpetuating phenomenon: having a higher sex ratio in a given area (community, or age cohort) at a given time promotes a higher sex ratio in the same place in the next generation as well, and similarly having a lower sex ratio results a vicious circle, which may be difficult to break.

(I've earlier mentioned here that the balance of migration between Russia and China is increasingly balanced, as China booms, Chinese migrants become more picky, and Russians start to be attracted to their prosperous southern neighbour).

3. Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes issue with a recent New York Times article on the sex trade in Spain. Sensationalized coverage of the sex trade, and of abusive practice associated with it especially insofar as migrant workers and their experiences are concerned, isn't a substitute for good analysis.

I wonder if future historians will track how misinformation about migration and sex work was so willfully reproduced during the present period, how news publications with a reputation for actual investigation began to copy chunks of pseudo news and paste them together, were satisfied to quote only society’s most predictable, official and reductionist sources and failed to admit that the police force of any country is not the place to find out about complex social problems.

Any authentic interest in the topic at hand could not be titled In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism – a cartoon-like story full of the most superficial sensationalist cliches, mostly derived from police sources and a few abolitionist advocates. Yet this is the story The New York Times published on its front page the other day, complete with a ludicrous photo of a young woman in high red boots worthy of the cheapest rag. As the story claimed to be about brothels (indoor venues), why did they illustrate the story with a picture of street prostitution – again, on the front page? I know of no serious research that talks about brothel tourism, by the way. On the other hand, men who live in places where no venues are available have always been known to cross borders or travel distances to get to them. There is no news about that.

The issue is failure to investigate and report dysfunctional migration policy and how growing economic inequalities promote the taking of unregulated, unprotected jobs in in underground economies, including in the sex industry.

Go, read.

Some more population-related links

The immigration of white South African farmers to Georgia, according to Eastern approaches, is actually occurring.

In August 2010, showing commendable imagination from a 5,000-mile distance, the authorities in Tbilisi invited South African farmers wanting a change of scene to consider an alternative: farming in Georgia. The country has an exuberantly pro-business government, low crime rates, and soil that positively squelches with underexploited potential. Once an agricultural power-house, Georgia now farms less than half of its arable land. It has less than half the number of cows and one-third of the pigs that it had in 1990. Agriculture employs over half the population, yet contributes less than a tenth of GDP. Ridiculously, this fertile country now imports 70 percent of its food. As a result, many of Georgia’s poorest people live in the countryside. Agriculture contributed over 16% of GDP in 2005, but only 8% in 2010.

[. . .]

Many local farmers are still suspicious. Most of them are subsistence-level producers; nation-wide, the average farm is less than one hectare. Seeing a government that has long paid them little attention suddenly court South Africans has produced mixed feelings. Last year, local farmers demonstrated in the village of Zeghduleti, near Gori, after common pasture that they had long used for grazing was cleared for sale to a foreign investor. After a number of arrests, the farmers were eventually advised to slaughter their cattle or graze them further afield. Georgia’s impatient government has a taste for dramatic change and short-term results. But as farmers know better than most, patience can be a virtue too.

Marginal Revolution observes that the incumbent Haitian president might be expelled from office if it turns out that he has been hiding a foreign citizenship, dual citizenship being unpopular in Haiti as a general rule and potentially even cause for banishment if a dual citizen involves himself in politics.

Marginal Revolution wonders why more Americans aren't moving to booming western Canada. The general consensus in the comments seems to be that Americans find it more difficult to move to Canada that you'd expect, for legal and cultural reasons as much as anything else.

The Population Reference Bureau's blog notes that improvements in sex ratios at birth in Indian states have stagnated for the time being.

The northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana have been the worst offenders. Haryana, formerly part of Punjab, was created in 1966 and borders Delhi to the north, west, and south. In 1999-2001, these states had very low SRBs of just 775 and 803, respectively. While they have since risen to 836 and 849, the last three SRS reports show a worrying tendency for the SRB rise to have leveled off. A low birth rate is often considered motivation for sex-selective abortion as male children could be more valued when couples have few children but that pattern is definitely not uniform across India. In Punjab, the total fertility rate (TFR — the average number of children a woman would bear in her lifetime in the birth rate of a particular year were to remain unchanged) was 1.9 in 2008 and 2.5 in Haryana. But it was also low in Karnataka (2.0) and Kerala (1.7), states with SRBs in the normal range. And, the two states with the highest TFRs, Bihar (3.9) and Uttar Pradesh (3.8), have low SRBs. Together, those latter two states hold 300 million population, one-fourth of India’s total.

Anatoly Karlin's brief post at Sublime Oblivion makes a convincing case that Russian demographics are no longer uniquely dre, with rising fertility, falling mortality, and net migration.

Some demography links

This afternoon--this afternoon in Toronto, at least--I thought I'd share with you five interesting demographics-related blog posts.

At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather reports on the news that men in the United States are catching up to women in terms of life expectancy.

Dealing with my earlier post about biased sex ratios in the South Caucasus, fellow Livejournaler demographer has written--translated post here, original post here--on the subject, suggesting that the apparent deficit is a consequence of the underregistration of female births.

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis writes about the barrier along the Pakistani border built by the Iranians, dividing the historical region of Baluchistan. While built in an effort to control insurgents, the wall has a secondary use of limiting Pakistani migration into Iran.

The Global Sociology Blog links to an extended BBC series describing the effects of the male-biased sex ratio in India, describing things as varied as the grief of women forced to abort their daughters, the migration of women from more sex-balanced areas in southern India to the male-biased north, the shocking deterioration in the sex ratio in Kashmir, and Indian government efforts to encourage the birth of female children.

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen summarizes a new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. This book makes the point, made here several times, that Muslim societies around the world are also going through the demographic transition, albeit each in their own distinctive ways.

Why are sex ratios at birth so male-biased in the South Caucasus?

Earlier this month, my attention was caught by a Behind the Numbers blog post by Carl Haub which described how sex ratios in the countries of the South Caucasus--Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan--were among the most unbalanced in the world.

Son preference and sex-selective abortion in China and India have frequently been in the news but who would ever have thought of it in the Caucasus countries? But it’s there, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, three former Soviet Republics and the trends have been well analyzed in a recent paper.* The normal global biological sex ratio at birth (SRB) is 105 male births per 100 female. Where son preference is strong and the sex of a fetus is determined, there has been a rise in the abortion of female fetuses in recent years.

The SRB in those countries began rising in the mid-1990s and, in 2009, stood at 114 in Armenia and 118 in Azerbaijan. Birth reporting in Georgia has been somewhat erratic but the pattern is similar if not quite as skewed upwards. Abortion had long been used as a form of birth control in the Soviet Union and the practice has continued in the Caucasus. A low fertility rate is often thought to create a particularly likely impetus for sex-selective abortion when son preference is strong. In all three countries, the SRB for third births was well above the total SRB. In Armenia, the SRB for third births was about 140 in 2000-2004; in Azerbaijan, it was about 150; and, in Georgia, it was about 145. Of course, third births are much less frequent with low birth rates. In recent years, the SRB does appear to have leveled off, but their SRB’s are now exceeded only by China’s.

Such a ratio can't help things at all. Georgia that--as I noted here in August 2008--has been seeing massive emigration since the end of the Soviet Union, just like Armenia to its south and even Azerbaijan to its east. Georgia and Armenia have cohort fertility rates substantially below replacement levels, while Azerbaijan is getting there. If future cohorts of women come to be so outnumbered by men, the South Caucasus' demographic catastrophes can only worsen. As my co-blogger Scott just mentioned, gender balance can well be a competitive advantage in the economic sense, as human capital is found and used more equitably without misogynistic attitudes. Again, this is profoundly self-destructive.

But why is this going on? The Social Sciences in the Caucasus blog notes that the shift in sex ratios only occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when sex ratios were more normal, while commenters suggested that this shift is to be expected in economically straitened times in societies where abortion is an acceptable method of birth control and male children are valued more than female children. Sabina Kiryashova's IWPR article "Abortion Used for Sex Selection in Azerbaijan" describes this mentality.

Such abortions have become increasingly common in Azerbaijan in recent years, particularly since the use of ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby has became widespread.

Up to four of the eight women who come into gynaecologist Gulustan Aslanova’s clinic each day for abortions do so because they are expecting an unwanted girl.

Research conducted by the Women’s Crisis Centre in a main Baku maternity hospital found that abortions carried out because of the sex of the child are currently third behind those done because of the family’s financial situation and ones for contraceptive purposes.

Azad Isazade, a psychologist at the centre, said that in Azerbaijan, as in many eastern countries, preference has always been given to boys. That is rooted in the pre-Islamic, pagan period when men were needed for farming and newborn girls were buried alive.

That no longer happens, but some families see the lack of a male heir as a tragedy or even a curse.

This is fine, but why in the South Caucasus? In the online essay collection Watering the Neighbour's Garden: The Growing Demographic Female Deficit in Asia, the paper by Meslé et al. "A Sharp Increase in Sex Ratio at Birth in the Caucasus. Why? How?" (73-88) makes the point that the shift is unprecedented, occurring in the absence of any state coercion, without any parallels either elsewhere in the former Soviet Union or elsewshere in the Greater Middle East.

It is true that the countries of the Caucasus are very small compared to some of their neighbours and it is easy to imagine that by decreasing the scale to internal administrative districts the same phenomenon could be observed in some regions of Russia, Iran, and Turkey that are close to the Caucasus, particularly among the Azeri in Iran, in the Caucasian republics of southern Russia, and in the eastern regions of Turkey that border Armenia. It is for this reason that we have attempted to collect data by local districts in the countries of the Caucasus and also in the three closest large countries, as well as in Syria. [. . .]


When this data is assembled on a detailed map of the region, two observations reinforce the contrast suggested by national indicators. On the one hand, within each of the three countries of the Caucasus, high sex ratios at birth are almost systematically observed in all the regions. The only notable exceptions concern two groups of Azeri rayons concentrated in the North on the border with Russia and in the South on the border with Iran. On the other hand, no such ratios are observed in the administrative districts nearest to the countries of the Caucasus, either in Russia, Iran, Turkey, or Syria. In Russia, the federated republics of the northern Caucasus such as Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, and Dagestan are all between 104 and 107. Only North Ossetia is slightly over 108. In Iran all the northern provinces and notably the four sharing a border with Azerbaijan (Gilan, Ardebil, eastern Azerbaijan, western Azerbaijan) are below 107. Finally, in Turkey there is a zone around the Van Lake, which is slightly over 107, but all the provinces along the border with Georgia and Armenia are between 104 and 107.

The number of abortions a woman has rises if the first children born are female, but still. Why in the South Caucasus?

On changing demographics and the role of women

I wanted to highlight the latest post at Behind the Numbers "What’s Changed (or Not) for Women Since the First International Women’s Day 100 Years Ago?". The demographics of different communities around the world were very different from the way they were no, not least because of the substantially inferior status of women. How different were they?

In 1911, the U.S. population was 92 million, less than one-third of its current size of about 310 million. Life expectancy was 54 years for women and 51 for men. The leading cause of death, after heart disease, was tuberculosis. And 1 in 10 children died before his or her first birthday. Our U.S. statistics of 100 years ago are much like those of sub-Saharan Africa today.

In 1911, the global population was 1.8 billion, and today it has nearly quadrupled to 7 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the fastest growing region of the world and 42 percent of women in the region are under the age of 15 (compared with 19 percent in the United States). [. . .] Women in sub-Saharan Africa give birth to an average of 5.2 children each, in comparison to U.S. women who today have an average of 2 children each.

In 1911, men in the United States were five times as likely as women to be gainfully employed. And child labor was common: 26 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls ages 10 to 15 were employed as “breadwinners.” Based on the higher levels of employment among boys, perhaps it is not surprising that three times as many girls as boys were enrolled in school. In 1911, U.S. women were more likely to have graduated from high school than men, but less than one-third of college graduates were women. Today, women outnumber men on college campuses in the United States. In developing countries, great strides have been made in girls’ education at the primary level, but less so at the secondary level. Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind the rest of the world, with only 34 percent of women enrolled in secondary school, and a far smaller percentage enrolled in college or professional schooling beyond high school.

Nearly half of all wage earners in the United States are women, but among full time workers, they earn only 80 percent of what men earn. Women in the United States hold only 17 percent of public office seats at the federal level, far lower than in most regions of the world, and even slightly lower than in sub-Saharan Africa, where women hold 18 percent of parliamentary seats.

By 1911, women in the United States had, on average, only 3.4 births each. How this was accomplished in the absence of widespread availability of birth control is not entirely clear, but condoms were available, as were “traditional” methods – withdrawal and periodic abstinence. The diaphragm, the first manufactured contraceptive method for women, was not widely known or available at that time because the federal Comstock Laws of 1873 made it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail, including contraceptive devices and information. The Comstock Laws as they affected the sale and distribution of contraception were not overturned until 1936. By 1940, a third of all U.S. women used a diaphragm for contraception. Today, 79 percent of American women use a method of contraception, compared with only 23 percent of women in sub-Saharan Africa. Few women on either continent rely on a diaphragm, despite its demonstrated safety and efficacy, even in low resource settings.

It's worth noting that the position of women and the state of the demographic transition in the United States--and other relatively advanced societies--had come substantially from the dire demographics of the pre-modern era I'd written about earlier. In Michael Haines' essay EH.net "Fertility and Mortality in the United States", the extent of change from the 18th century was substantial.

The high fertility of American women attracted comment from late eighteenth-century observers, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Malthus. Mortality rates were probably moderate, with crude death rates ranging from about twenty per one thousand people per annum to over forty. We know a good deal about mortality rates in New England, somewhat less about the Middle Colonies, and least about the South. But apparently mortality was lower from Pennsylvania and New Jersey northward, and higher in the South. Life expectancy at birth ranged from the late twenties to almost forty.

[. . . There was a] sustained decline in white birthrates from at least 1800 and of black fertility from at least 1850. Family sizes were large early in the nineteenth century, being approximately seven children per woman at the beginning of the century and between seven and eight for the largely rural slave population at mid-century. The table also reveals that mortality did not begin to decline until about the 1870s or so. Prior to that, death rates fluctuated, being affected by periodic epidemics and changes in the disease environment. There is some evidence of rising death rates during the 1830s and 1840s. The table also shows that American blacks had both higher fertility and higher mortality relative to the white population, although both groups experienced fertility and mortality transitions. For example, both participated in the rise in birthrates after World War II known as the baby boom, as well as the subsequent resumption of birthrate declines in the 1960s.

Conventional explanations for the fertility transition have involved the rising cost of children because of urbanization, the growth of incomes and nonagricultural employment, the increased value of education, rising female employment, child labor laws and compulsory education, and declining infant and child mortality. Changing attitudes toward large families and contraception, as well as better contraceptive techniques, have also been cited. Recent literature suggests that women were largely responsible for much of the birthrate decline in the nineteenth century -- part of a movement for greater control over their lives. The structural explanations fit the American experience since the late nineteenth century, but they are less appropriate for the fertility decline in rural areas prior to about 1870. The increased scarcity and higher cost of good agricultural land has been proposed as a prime factor, although this is controversial. The standard explanations do not adequately explain the post-World War II baby boom and subsequent baby bust. More complex theories, including the interaction of the size of generations with their income prospects, preferences for children versus material goods, and expectations about family size, have been proposed.

What will be next insofar as women and changing demographics are concerned? An emphasis on expanding the choices available to women is going to be key. Going back to the past isn't an option.

More on Iran's continuing demographic transition

Over at the Population Reference Bureau's Behind the Numbers blog, Farzaneh Roudi writes about the latest population-related news in Iran. trying to reverse the ongoing demographic transiton in Iran that I wrote about last July, Ahmedinejad wants to create a sort of baby bonus for prospective Iranian parents. This bonus, Roudi notes, won't go nearly far enough to overcome the real economic costs of parenthood.

Under this new plan each child born in the current Iranian year, which began March 21, will receive a $950 deposit in a government bank account. They will then continue to receive $95 every year until they reach 18. Parents will also be expected to pay matching funds into the accounts. Then, children can withdraw the money at the age of 20 and use it for education, marriage, health and housing. But Iranian parents, with their daily economic struggle to make the ends meet, know that this amount is not going to go far. This reminds me of when I was in Iran about 10 years ago, a few months after Dr. Marandi, former Iranian minister of health, received UNFPA’s annual award for his contribution to improving maternal and child health in Iran. When I told relatives and friends about Dr. Marandi’s award and the drop in fertility, they all had a similar reaction. They would laughingly say, “Why did HE receive the award? You only need to go to a grocery store and check prices and you can see for yourself why families don’t want to have more children.” And today, prices are even higher than 10 years ago.

This crude approach also underestimates the extent and depth of the changes in Iranian culture. Traditional gender norms, no matter how strictly the Iranian government might try to enforce them, are going.

Iranian women live a modern lifestyle that is often not seen in Western media that show women covered head to toe in black, as if they belong to centuries ago. Elementary school enrollment is universal; the gender gap in secondary school enrollment is almost closed; and more girls are enrolled in universities than boys. And more important, the educational system is modern and only a very small percentage of students attend religious schools—contrary to what is happening in some neighboring countries. In short, Ahmadinejad’s argument—rejecting family planning as a Western and secular plot – is not going to be bought by Iranians. Despite continued international economic sanctions and political isolations, secular ideas are pouring into the country through satellite TVs and the Internet. Iranians have the second-highest rate of Internet use in the Middle East and North Africa region, after the United Arab Emirates.

While I don’t see much reason for Ahmadinejd’s new policy to influence country’s overall fertility, the crude birth rate in Iran is going to increase for a decade or so, as the baby boomers go through their childbearing years. So one should not rush to judgment and attribute future increases in the number of births to the success of Ahmadinejad’s policy. Today, a significant portion of Iran’s population are in their 20s and early 30s (prime ages to marry and have children), born during the high-fertility era around the 1979 Islamic revolution and 1980s.

If anything, I'd suggest that Iran's government trying to force traditional gender roles on economically autonomous women could lead to women postponing or opting out of parenthood altogether, pushing Iran towards the lowest-low fertility trap that dominates southern Europe within a generation. That wouldn't do anything for Iran's economic prospects.

A few news links

Over the past couple of weeks, I've come across a lot of interesting population-related news links. Here they all are!

China Daily's Lin Shujuan writes about how a huge diaspora from Qingtian county (in eastern Zhejiang province) has, through settlement in western Europe, has helped make that newly wealthy county profoundly globalized.

IceNews reports on the heavy emigration from Greenland, especially among the young and educated of that island, that threatens the island's viability for independence.

]

At The Australian, Bernard Salt points out that Australia's recent trend towards a population in the 34 million range in a generation's time is quite recent and the discussion was triggered by a single document.

The New York Times writes about how growing demand for labour in migrant-sending areas of interior China is causing labour shortages in coastal China.

Last month, Polish radio reported that 25% of Poles in Iceland (almost all very recent immigrants) are unemployed, versus 9% of native Icelanders.

In 2009, Iceland Review reports that Iceland saw the net emigration of nearly five thousand people, most heading to other Nordic countries and a quarter to Poland.

Blic reports on how Serbia is trying to prevent brain drain to the West via spending on scientists' facilities and homes.

The Albanian Times writes about how Greece's economic crisis is hitting Albania by pushing Albanians migrants in Greece out of paid employment and possibly even back to an ill-prepared Albania.

South Korea's Chosun Ilbo reports on the continued low period fertility rate in South Korea, and the increasing tendency to postpone marriage and childbearing.

Switzerland is continuing to see strong population growth, driven mainly by immigration.

Some more links

Writing in the Guardian, Fred Pearce uses the demographic situation in East Germany, defined by the mass emigration of its residents--esppecially well-qualified women--to the West, to wonder if East Germany will be the model for Europe in the generations to come.

Asia Times' Christian Segura writes about the Tibetan diaspora in Beijing; Tibet, it seems, is still marked by net emigration, not the reverse.

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen links to an interesting study suggesting that the more male-biased the sex ratio in a Chinese region, the higher the savings rate (so as to make the sons more attractive in the marriage market).

The Independent's Cahal Milmo examines how the mass emigration of young Kyrgystani men to work in richer Russia and Kazakhstan is destabilizing traditional culture, creating yawning economic inequalities and destabilizing family traditions even as it provides the funds necessary for the survival of the people left behind.

Belgium's Le Vif/L'Express examines the history of Flemish immigration into Wallonia.

On the growing gender imbalance among young Vietnamese

IPS' Helen Clark reports that Vietnam is joining that cluster of East Asian countries marked by a strongly male-biased sex ratio, following the standard rationale.

Vietnam is something of a regional leader when it comes to gender equality. There are laws against domestic violence and discrimination, and very high female literacy.

Yet its sex ratio is skewed. For every 100 girls born, there are 112 boys. People prefer sons.

"If you have sons and they have children, they will carry on the family name," says Ngo Thi Thanh Nhan, 32. "People want boys so when they are pregnant with girls - abortion. This thinking must change," she adds, cradling her second daughter who is less than a month old.

In keeping with Vietnamese tradition, mother and child will remain confined to their home in District 10, Ho Chi Minh city, for the next two months.

Nhan watches as female relatives coo over her daughter, Dang Nghi. "I prefer girls but my husband likes boys. Boys and girls are the same, I think," she says. Will she have a third child? No, she has been sterilised.

The Population Ordinance, restricting families to two children, was reinstated in November 2008, after being rescinded in 2003. It was originally brought in during the mid-1980s thanks to government fears of a population boom and corresponding strains on resources.

Vietnam's sex ratio at birth (SRB) has been rising steadily for the past few years, from the "average" 105 boys to 100 girls in 1999 to 110:100 in 2006. This year it topped at an average of 112:100.

There are regional variances, with rates remaining around the natural average in the southern Mekong provinces but rising as high as 120:100 in the northeast. This mirrors neighbouring China with its one child law, repealed only recently. The SRB there had climbed to 120:100.

A recent UNFPA report noted, "(The) SRB is a reliable indicator of women's status in terms of gender inequality." "Confucian values" which prize sons over daughters and men over women have been blamed in part. Vietnam traditionally has been a patrilineal society, with sons responsible for caring for parents in old age. Daughters, who marry and leave, are considered "outsiders".

"If you don't have a son you are considered finished. You don't have happiness or luck in your life," Dr Nguyen Dang Anh, a research fellow at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, told IPS via phone.

The General Statistics Office of Vietnam suggests that, as a result of past war casualties and male-dominated emigration flows, there is a slight excess of women over men for the population as a whole, as the tables for men and women illustrates. This new trend, then, is a change.

Back in 2006, Edward and I examined the consequences of an artificially-created excess of male children over female. By taking so many children out of the reproductive equation, for instance, replacement-level fertility rates in Vietnam have been biased upwards just as much as by infant mortality, as per Aslak's post. The longer-term consequences for Vietnam also bear consideration, since as Edward pointed out last year Vietnam actively promotes emigration, particularly but not only temporary emigration, while one of the most notable vehicles for female emigration is through "marriage migration", joining male partners in wealthy similarly gender-unbalanced East Asia countries like South Korea and Taiwan.

The decadent shall inherit the Earth

The concern about excessive aging in developed countries is obviously not limited to this blog but also extends to the governments in question. Among other things, this has lead the OECD to establish the OECD Family database, which is a nice collection of data about things like fertility, public spending on family benefits and child care, parental leave, female employment etc. in the developed world.


One of the more interesting things is the correlation between fertility and the share of births outside wedlock.


The correlation is even clearer when you exclude the formerly communist countries as well as countries like Mexico and Turkey:



Now, obviously this flies in the face of the socially conservative meme that the dissolution of family values leads to the dissolution of society and people becoming too "selfish" to have children. Correlation is not causation, but I do feel that the share of births outside marriage is a useful proxy for how traditional the family structure is. The problem with the traditional family from a demographic perspective is that it often forces the mother to choose between career and children. In very traditional societies, where women do not have the opportunity to pursue careers, this does lead to high fertility rates. But once you give the women the opportunity to pursue careers, the traditional family structure makes them choose, and a lot of them will choose their careers and maybe one child. Countries with more flexible family structures that give women the opportunity to combine their careers with motherhood get a double bonus: both higher female employment rates, since those who would prioritize motherhood in a more traditional society get the chance to work, and higher fertility rates, since those who prioritize their careers have more children. Indeed, an often-noted trend in the demographic literature is the emergence of a strong correlation between female labor force participation rates and fertility in developed countries.


Note that this graph is from 2001. If I had the time to make a more recent one, it would show an even stronger relationship.

Two Foreign Policy Links

The always-interesting magazine Foreign Policy features two articles of note to our readers.

Reihan Salam's "The Death of Macho" examines the consequences of how the Great Recession is accelerating a power shift from men away from women in societies around the world, as the old industrial economies which drew on male labour decline while the service industries which depend disproportionately on female workers continue to grow, even while traditional masculine risk-taking strategies are coming under pressure in the middle of a backlash against the practice which helped trigger the global economic crisis.

Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell have come up with an interesting infographic (("Sex Matters") which examines the ways in which contraception has transformed demographics, showing everything from the types of contraceptives and rates of use in different parts of the world, to charts showing how long it took family sizes to fall from six to 3.5 members (58 years in the United States, and yes !, 6 years in