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The paper explores how fathers perceive the economic costs and benefits of raising children and how these perceptions influence preferred number of children and contraceptive use. Interviews were conducted for this study in 1969 with an island-wide sample of 2200 Taiwanese husbands. Analysis indicates that a complex of cost and benefit considerations has an appreciable net effect on reproductive attitudes and behaviour, after socio-economic status and demographic characteristics have been taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan has attracted a considerable amount of demographic interest in recent years because of a marked decline of fertility since 1956. In this paper the authors utilize data from the household registration system to analyse variations of fertility among 292 local administrative areas in 1961. The study reveals a strong negative correlation between total fertility and a series of indicators of social development and communication. Most of the variation in fertility is accounted for by differences in the fertility of married women aged over 30 and in the age at marriage. The decline of total fertility is accounted for primarily by a reduction of the marital fertility of women over 30. The adoption of family limitation was by no means confined to urban centres, but apparently originated there and spread rapidly to small towns and rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it is to present the secular trends of fertility decline in Taiwan, pointing out that family-planning programmes began only after the birth rate had already shown a substantial decline. Secondly, it is to evaluate specifically the impact of family-planning programmes in the Taichung area, since its "success" has been widely proclaimed and led to an extension of the programme to the whole country. Thirdly, the authors argue that the dynamics of Taiwanese fertility changes may be related to declining infant mortality and accelerating educational development, and that these institutional effects, rather than the family planning programme, should be given credit for changes in fertility. The evidence shows that Taiwan's fertility was neither induced nor accelerated by the programme. This fact was especially obvious in Taichung city, where the action programmes were concentrated. Among the villages, the standardized partial regression coefficient of infant mortality was significant in many time periods. Yet, the effect of education on fertility was rarely significant, until the later periods. For the urban townships both infant mortality and education are found to be significant; however, educational level maybe more important in determining fertility than mortality decline.

This paper takes a look at the belief that the number of couples currently desiring to limit family size is sufficiently large that the provision of supplies, services and education will be adequate to bring the birth rate down to acceptable levels within a reasonable time period. Current family planning programmes emphasize the provision of supplies, services and education. Attempts to change motivation through the use of monetary incentives have raised a very minor role so far. Implicit in this ordering of priorities must be the belief that the number of couples latently or actively desiring to limit family size is sufficiently large - or can be made sufficiently large through education and persuasion - to bring the birth rate down to acceptable levels reasonable soon. A debate is in progress about the extent to which the official family planning programmes in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have been responsible for the fall in their rates. Monetary incentives were not widely or intensively used in these programmes. While there is no doubt that they speeded up the process of demographic transition, it is not clear how successful they would have been had they been initiated ten or twenty years earlier, before the socioeconomic situation became favorable.

This paper discusses and presents data obtained through various studies and surveys on the effect of the IUD contraceptive programme in Taiwan. It has been demonstrated that the fertility of IUD acceptors before first acceptance was 58% higher than that of married women in that, after acceptance, it declined by about 76%. The corresponding fertility decline among married women in general was only about 5%. Acceptors had had more recent births, as indicated by their shorter `open interval' of 207 months, compared with 374 months among the women in the KAP survey sample. If the fertility of IUD acceptors had declined at the same rate as that of married women in general in the absence of IUD, the insertion of about 4 IUDs would probably prevent one birth in the following year. Observation over a longer period, however, is needed to determine the demographic effect of lUD. Data on fertility control practice after termination, type of termination of pregnancies after first acceptance, life-table rates by various socio-demographic characteristics of acceptors, and the `life expectancy' of the first segment of IUD are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water thefts and conflicts are more common in some irrigation systems or in some parts of a single irrigation system, than in others. Water thievery in the Nan-hung canal system in Taiwan is analyzed through an examination of the need to steal, the opportunities to steal, farmer awareness of opportunities to steal, and farmer willingness to steal. Water supply, water rights customs, water control methods, the location of houses, and the size of the system influence the number and distribution of thefts and conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specific economic and social patterns of a dispersed population in northern Taiwan reveal no basis for judging the village unit as the "self-contained world" of the rural householder either today or, from the available information, in the traditional past. The data collected in the field portray a remarkable conformity of spatial preferences with the administrative unit at the township (hsiang-chen) level. It appears that the hsiang-chen constitutes a social, economic, and administrative unit in which territoriality furnishes an important integrating element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Important strides have been made toward the goal of describing and summarizing age patterns of mortality in human populations and of indicating the types of variation typically found among those age patterns. Socio-economic, cultural and public health factors are the major determinants of the overall level of mortality, but the contribution of these and other factors to the slope and curvature of mortality curves is largely unexplored, as is the related question of the extent to which mortality patterns and the variation among them depends upon the composition of deaths by cause. This article discusses the role of causal factors on the relationship between the mortality level between ages 1 and 4 and that between ages 5 and 34 in non-Western populations. For the period 1957 to 1968, a period of rapid mortality decline in Taiwan, death data are available by age, sex and cause, and mid-year population data are available by age and sex. The relationship between mortality conditions in childhood and adult life is a principal component of the variation among observed age patterns of mortality. Estimates of fertility parameters which are based on reverse projection of an enumerated childhood population or on stable population theory are sensitive to the age pattern of mortality. Reverse projection depends directly on rates of infant and childhood mortality.

Study of the progress of the family planning programme in Taiwan, should be of particular interest to demographers and family planning administrators for several reasons. Taiwan has a nearly closed population of reasonable size, the programme implemented six years ago was carefully planned, successfully implemented, and systematically evaluated, and, furthermore, there is a good registration and vital statistics system. The island may therefore be considered as a demographic laboratory to test whether the fertility of a sufficiently large population may be significantly reduced within a reasonable period of time through an organized family planning programme. The present article describes the highlights of the accomplishments during the past six years. Fertility in Taiwan had been high. Crude birth rates before the Second World War had been between 40 and 45 and decreased slightly to 38 in 1947, rose to 50 in 1951 and gradually came down thereafter to 36 in 1963, a year before the expanded family planning programme started. Government participation started in 1959, when family planning was included as part of the maternity and child health programme. The programme was tactfully designated the pre-pregnancy health programme.

The article discusses the setting, accomplishment and evaluation procedures of a family-planning health programme in Taiwan, involving mainly the use of a new intra-uterine contraceptive device. The area has a total population of over 12 millions. In spite of the fact that no official policy exists, 46,600 or 36% of the married women aged 20-39 years accepted the method in a year. The highest rate of acceptance in an individual town was 18.4%. Number of living children and educational level of wives were two important factors in acceptance. By follow-up interview of samples of acceptors by trained public health nurses, it has been determined that the loops were expelled in 44% of the cases, removed in 131% and re-inserted in 1.6%. 84% of the women continue to use the device with a pregnancy rate of 38 per 100 woman years after an average of 4.3 months of use. In view of the enthusiastic response of the public toward the new device, it is hoped that Taiwan may be the first area in the world to show that the fertility of a sufficiently large population can be significantly brought down by planned contraceptive efforts.

This article presents reproductive Histories of Chinese Women in Rural Taiwan. In Taiwan, the household registration records, including birth, death, marriage, dissolution of marriage, occupation, education and migration, etc., are kept in the local government offices. This system was first effectively established in 1905 in connection with the first census. During the Japanese occupation it was supervised by the famous colonial police whose authority was required to make a change in the record. The Japanese took seven censuses, each carefully designed in co-operation with the police authorities, and used the census as an island-wide re-check of the registration system. Since World War II the quality of the registration system has deteriorated. The situation was especially confused around the period 1948-1950 when mass migration from mainland China took place. The proportion of mainland Chinese became rather large, especially in the cities. However, in rural areas where the proportion of mainland Chinese is low, the quality of the system still seems high.

In the early 1950's Taiwanese farmers using the Nan-hung Canal for irrigation learned that rice cultivation required less water than they had thought. After several features of their irrigation system were altered, they changed theft water control methods as practiced during periods of low water supply and so allowed significant changes in cropping patterns during the first rice crop season. Previously, farmers whose fields took water from the end portion of the canal or of long ditches spent much more time and effort in bringing water to theft fields and received less water than did farmers high in the system. The former thus could not allot as much land to wet rice as they wished. As a result of the changes, all users of the Nan-hung system now have enough water to raise rice on as much of their land as they desire. In addition, those who once expended considerable effort on water control activities now work only a little more than do farmers high in the system. Therefore, the location of a field with respect to the source of water of its ditch or the canal is no longer important in affecting its water availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]