The Second Demographic Transition in Asia? Comparative Analysis of the Low Fertility Situation in East and South-East Asian Countries

Introduction In the latter half of the 20th century, the world population increased unprecedentedly in large part by the population explosion in the developing region. Such population explosion was caused by widening gap between the rapid mortality decline and the persistence of high fertility. When and how fast fertility in the developing region would decline and whether policy intervention is necessary and effective for fertility reduction in the developing region have been one of the keenest and the most urgent interests related to population-development-environment issues in postwar years in the world. Fertility transition, that is, fertility decline from a high level to a low level, usually to the replacement level, occurred first in the Western Europe between around the middle of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century and spread to Southern and Eastern Europe. Japan became the first country which showed just after World War‡U that fertility transition was possible in nonWestern societies. Fertility decline has spread, first, to countries in Asia neighboring Japan and some countries in Latin America, and fertility has started to decline subsequently in the whole developing region including already even a part of sub-Sahara Africa. Fertility decline became “not an exception, but a norm” (Cleland, 1996) in the world. Especially in East and South-East Asia (ESEA), seven countries and areas, including Japan, have already completed fertility transition, by which the pattern of fertility transition has been diversified from the single Western model. In the 1970s when fertility decline toward the replacement level had started or continued in the developing regions, fertility in the Western societies started to decline below the replacement level. Below-replacement fertility has continued in this region up to now already for a quarter of a century, and it spread rapidly to Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union since they began to change their economic system in around 1990. Some demographers called such long-lasting and widening fertility decline below the replacement level which was accompanied by changes in reproductive values, norms and behavior in general as “the second demographic transition”(Van de Kaa, 1987 and 1999; Lesthaeghe, 1999). It still remains to be seen whether the idea of the second demographic transition has such universal applicability outside the European region as the first demographic transition theory. But most of the countries and areas in ESEA that had already completed fertility transition also continued or resumed fertility decline below replacement level. In this article, seven countries and areas in ESEA, that is Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, (South) Korea, Thailand, China and Taiwan, which have different cultural background from the Western societies, will be examined with respect to trends in fertility, their demographic determinants, their social and economic background and their relation to the traditional family system, focusing on their comparison between the period of fertility transition and that of below-replacement fertility.