No abstract

We examine data from a national survey of 15 -27 year olds in the Philippines to assess attitudes toward marriage and cohabitation, and we analyze the marital and nonmarital union experiences of 25 -27 year olds. We find that attitudes toward cohabitation remain quite conservative among young Filipinos, although men view cohabitation more favorably than do women. We also find that men's socioeconomic status affects their ability to enter unions, particularly marriage, whereas women's union formation patterns are influenced by the family in which they grew up, their participation in religious services, and to some degree by their place of residence. Both men and women who hold more liberal attitudes on a range of issues are more likely to have cohabited than are individuals who do not share those views. For now, however, we do not expect cohabitation to become a widespread substitute for marriage in the Philippines.

This study examines the relationship between migration and union dissolution among Puerto Ricans, a Latino subgroup characterized by recurrent migration between Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Based on pooled life-history data from comparable surveys undertaken in Puerto Rico and the United States, we find that: 1) Puerto Rican women who have lived on the U.S. mainland have markedly higher rates of union disruption than those with no U.S. experience; and 2) even net of a wide variety of possible explanatory factors, the relatively high rates of union instability among first and second generation U.S. residents and return migrants are strongly related to recent and lifetime migration experience. The results suggest that the weak social ties of migrants provide limited social support for their unions and few barriers to union disruption.

This study explores the impact of temporary and more permanent internal migration, along with family resources and individual human capital attributes, on upward and downward job transitions of workers in Thailand. Four multinomial logit origin and destination occupational transition models were estimated using the 1992 National Migration Survey of Thailand. Results showed that the increasingly frequent phenomenon of temporary migration was consistently associated with both lower occupational transition rates and downward occupational mobility. More permanent migration was associated with both upward and downward occupational mobility, and migration to Bangkok affected only specific occupational sector transitions.Occupational and geographic mobility are twin processes critical to the economic transformation of developing countries. Labor, which was formerly confined largely to agricultural production, becomes essential in fuelling the emerging manufacturing, service and professional sectors in modernizing economies. The links between occupational and geographic mobility derive from the commonly held assumption that many migrants in both developed and developing countries are motivated to move by the search for better economic opportunities, often in urban areas (DaVanzo and Morrison, 1981; Wilson, 1985).