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This paper reviews the trends and driving forces for the relatively recent growth in cross‐national marriages in East and Southeast Asia with a specific focus on the experiences of female marriage migrants from Southeast Asia. It explicates the various forms of inequality faced by the low‐income marriage migrant women including gender power dynamics within the household, socioeconomic inequalities, integration into the destination society, and intergenerational transfer of inequalities. We acknowledge that the inequality experienced by marriage migrant women results from a complex web of intersecting social‐cultural, political, and economic forces occurring in Asia in the past three decades. As a result of rising female educational attainment and the practice of marriage hypergamy in Asia, an increasing number of low socioeconomic‐status men from developed countries seek marriage partners abroad from lower‐income and less‐developed countries. Upon entering the cross‐national marriage market, many low‐income migrant women face multiple disadvantages in the host country due to inadequate socioeconomic support, language barriers, social stigma on foreign brides, and a lack of legal status. These inequalities exacerbate their initial disadvantages to perpetuate a vicious cycle of intergenerational disadvantages for their offspring. We conclude with a critique of extant literature and identify promising future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intense period of human population expansion over the past 250 years is about to cease. Total fertility rates are falling dramatically all over the world such that highly industrialized nations, including China and the tiger economies of SE Asia, will see their populations decline significantly in the coming decades. The socioeconomic, geopolitical and environmental ramifications of this change are considerable and invite a multidisciplinary consideration of the underlying mechanisms. In the short-term, socioeconomic factors, particularly urbanization and delayed childbearing are powerful drivers of reduced fertility. In parallel, lifestyle factors such as obesity and the presence of numerous reproductive toxicants in the environment, including air-borne pollutants, nanoplastics and electromagnetic radiation, are seriously compromising reproductive health. In the longer term, it is hypothesized that the reduction in family size that accompanies the demographic transition will decrease selection pressure on high fertility genes leading to a progressive loss of human fecundity. Paradoxically, the uptake of assisted reproductive technologies at scale, may also contribute to such fecundity loss by encouraging the retention of poor fertility genotypes within the population. Since the decline in fertility rate that accompanies the demographic transition appears to be ubiquitous, the public health implications for our species are potentially devastating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]