Between 1975 and 1995, the singulate mean age at marriage in Japan increased from 24.5 to 27.7 years for women and from 27.6 to 30.7 years for men, making Japan one of the latest-marrying populations in the world. Over the same period, the proportion of women who will never marry, calculated from age-specific first-marriage probabilities pertaining to a particular calendar year, increased from 5 to 15 percent for women and from 6 to 22 percent for men-behaviors sharply different from those characterizing the universal-marriage society of earlier years. This article investigates how and why these changes have come about. The reasons are bound up with rapid educational gains by women, massive increases in the proportion of women who work for pay outside the home, major changes in the structure and functioning of the marriage market, extraordinary increases in the prevalence of premarital sex, and far-reaching changes in values relating to marriage and family life. Copyright 2001 by The Population Council, Inc..

Longer lives and fertility far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman are leading to rapid population aging in many countries. Many observers are concerned that aging will adversely affect public finances and standards of living. Analysis of newly available National Transfer Accounts data for 40 countries shows that fertility well above replacement would typically be most beneficial for government budgets. However, fertility near replacement would be most beneficial for standards of living when the analysis includes the effects of age structure on families as well as governments. And fertility below replacement would maximize per capita consumption when the cost of providing capital for a growing labor force is taken into account. While low fertility will indeed challenge government programs and very low fertility undermines living standards, we find that moderately low fertility and population decline favor the broader material standard of living

This article describes a methodology for applying a discrete-time survival model-the complementary log-log model-to estimate effects of socioeconomic variables on (1) the total fertility rate and its components and (2) trends in the total fertility rate and its components. For the methodology to be applicable, the total fertility rate (TFR) must be calculated from parity progression ratios (PPRs). The components of the TFR are PPRs, the total marital fertility rate (TMFR), and the TFR itself as measures of the quantum of fertility, and mean and median ages at first marriage and mean and median closed birth intervals by birth order as measures of the tempo or timing of fertility. The focus is on effects of predictor variables on these measures rather than on coefficients, which are often difficult to interpret in the complex models that are considered. The methodology is applicable to both period and cohort data. It is illustrated by application to data from the 1993, 1998, and 2003 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in the Philippines.

Demographic trends in Japan are producing a declining population that is rapidly growing older. With a total fertility rate of around 1.3 children per woman, the population has already begun to decline. This article examines the impact of these demographic trends on the level of employment and economic growth that Japan is projected to experience over the next 20 years. We explore the effect of changes in labor market policies on age-specific employment rates and assess whether innovative policies can moderate the decline in employment. Public policies encouraging increased employment of women and persons aged 60 and older could partially offset the anticipated decline in employment. The importance of the Japanese experience for European policy makers is discussed.

Immediately after World War Two, Japan's fertility declined by more than 50 per cent in 10 years. This unprecedented decline of fertility resulted in a substantial shift in personal resource allocation away from childrearing and induced a rapid accumulation of physical capital in the 1950s, which provided a strong base for achieving Japan's phenomenal economic growth from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. By heavily drawing upon two simulation models, this paper attempts to show how large the demographic bonus was in post-war Japan and how serious the demographic onus is likely to be over the period 2000 Á/2025.