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It is widely documented that Thailand's National Family Planning Program (NFPP) has been successful in increasing contraceptive prevalence and reducing fertility. In this paper, we investigate to what extent setting up the NFPP between the mid 1960s and the early 1990s in local communities per se has added to this success. For this, we use data from the 1992/93 Survey on the Status of Women and Fertility in Thailand (SWAFT). We find that presence of the NFPP in a community is associated with less than two percentage points higher proportion of women with contraceptive experience at ages 15–19, to about six percentage points higher proportion at ages 35–39, and with about a 3 per cent lower completed fertility. Although these associations are relatively small, they are significant and may suggest that setting up the NFPP in local communities per se has been important for a small group of hard-to-reach women with unmet contraceptive needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility in Singapore has been at lowest-low levels of below 1.3 since 2003. Analysis on fertility trends in Singapore has thus far focused on period fertility. Cohort fertility analysis would be useful in examining whether current cohorts of women of childbearing age are likely to catch up on fertility in the near future. This paper briefly introduces the period fertility trends in Singapore, with an analysis of age-parity specific fertility rates. It then examines, in detail, cohort fertility using official administrative data, as well as census and survey data over time. Estimates of cohort fertility show that low period fertility in Singapore is mainly due to quantum rather than tempo effects. In the absence of any fundamental value changes in society in the near future, the declining cohort fertility means that period fertility in Singapore is unlikely to experience increases to levels higher than a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the effect of childcare leave on married women's fertility in Japan, based on data from the 2007 National Survey on Work and Family. The analysis takes into account how childcare leave influences fertility through its intermediate effects on women's selection into the labor market, job tenure, wages and the opportunity cost of children. Results indicate a strong effect of childcare leave on years of continuous job tenure with the same employer, and on predicted wages for full-time working women. Taking childcare leave for the first child increases the percentage progressing from first to second birth by six percentage points. There is also clear evidence that lowering the opportunity cost of children increases fertility, net of the effect of childcare leave, which affects fertility via the opportunity cost of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 2000–2025. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]