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Because of lower fertility and the various advances in terms of medicine, the number of people over 60 will have raisen from 500 million in 1990 to about 1.4 billion in 2030. If seen on a global scale, the issue of population ageing may give rise to various economic problems. As compared to when life expectancy was still relatively low, a large portion of the population will have claims to a share of a particular output in spite of not being about to provide labour sufficient enough to maintain their incomes. One of the major issues in both advanced and Third World countries will then involve how to organize this type of system while retaining economic growth and efficiency. In taking the political and financial risks into account, the resulting option as well as its consequences for pension fund development will significantly affect the financial system's structure.

Instead of focusing on a crisis for the welfare state, this chapter examines a contemporary crisis threat for which the welfare state in the form of family-friendly social policies may provide the answer. The crisis in question is a serious decline in advanced country fertility rates, which has left most OECD cou n tries with birthrates well below those required to replace existing population levels. The analysis shows that in the past few decades the world has almost literally been ‘turned upside down’, with fertility rates now highest in countries where cultural v a lues are least traditional and where public policies are most encouraging to female labour force participation. The chapter also analyses the effect of a variety of family-friendly policies and shows that the provision of childcare places is the measure m o st vital to raising advanced nation fertility levels.

Summarizes the main findings and discusses how social interactions can be used to extend the rational and individual‐centred approach of economists with social norms, bounded rationality, social learning, changing values, and attitudes. The combination of these elements yields new insights about the dynamics and determinants of fertility change. More generally, the book also reveals how the economic approach to individual behaviour can be broadened in order to overcome many of its traditional criticisms.

The authors observe that the issues covered in the book are subject to ongoing debate. They note that at the time of the book's publication, these questions were under review since the UK parliament was revising the legislation governing reproductive technologies and embryo research.

This chapter examines the fertility decline in mainland China since the 1970s. Using data from a wide range of sources, including the 2000 census and through linking recorded children to their mothers, it shows that China's Total Fertility Rate was likely to have fallen to 1.6 at the end of the 20th century. Useful information on changes in cohort fertility is provided through the examination of a tempo-adjusted Total Fertility Rate.

Many economists believe that education is key to economic development. The first section of this essay highlights what is known about the role of education in three interrelated areas: income generation, health status, and fertility. It discusses reasons why measuring the impact of education is difficult, and presents the best current estimates for the effects of education in these important areas. In bringing education to people in the developing world, an understanding of which school inputs are most effective and at what levels of education is paramount. The second half of the essay discusses why little is known about which inputs are most effective, and contrasts different approaches to assessing the impact of school inputs. The essay concludes with a discussion of programs that promise to be more successful in helping governments and policy makers decide how best to invest in human capital.

Explores the themes of what follows. It argues that the welfare state literature of the past quarter century has been big on crisis theories of the welfare state and much weaker on facts. The chapter suggests that, in order to say something meaningful about the future of the welfare state, we need to test crisis accounts, such as those built around globalization and population ageing, with facts drawn from comparative analysis to establish which are myths and which are realities.

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of fertility transition in Hong Kong and Taiwan. While very different from the mainland and people living there are not subject to the strict government birth control policies, the trajectory of fertility changes in Hong Kong and Taiwan has been broadly similar to that observed in the mainland. Useful information on tempo and quantum effects on fertility and the impact of recuperation on changes in cohort fertility are provided.

Revisits welfare regimes through the analytical lens of the family, first making the point that modernization theory should not have been taken at face value, since even if history has, in general, eroded the role of households in welfare production, this is perhaps less salient than specific international variations (some nations are characterized by their advanced level of de‐ familialization of welfare responsibilities, others for their sustained adherence to familialism). In other words, some societies may have brought the idealized Parsonian family into being; others reproduce many of the features of the ‘pre‐industrial’ household. Most welfare state theory provides little help in understanding such variation, and the real problem begins with the association of the nuclear family with industrialism, for it is simply wrong to assume that it lost its welfare functions with the advent of welfare states. The second point addresses the prevailing, often feminist, arguments that models of welfare regimes that have been specified via a political economy perspective fail to hold up when subject to a gendered analysis. Alternative gendered typologies do, in fact, often contradict political economy typologies, but the contradiction may be spurious because different phenomena are being explained and compared. The objective of this chapter is not to debate gender theories, but to understand the position of the (changing) family in the overall infrastructure of welfare production and consumption: what happens to our political economy models of welfare regimes when we insert the family; what are the effects of family change on welfare states and, ultimately, on post‐industrial change? However, since household‐welfare production is largely—but far from exclusively—based on women's unpaid labour, gender differences in the family‐welfare nexus clearly must be addressed. The three sections of the chapter are: Households and Welfare Production; The Family and Comparative Welfare Regimes; and Familialism and the Low‐Fertility Equilibrium.

Changes in household structure, fertility rates, and domestic technology all have consequences for labour market behaviour. This chapter explores these links. It starts by describing household structure and the role of children at the start and end of the 20th century. The next section considers the impact of domestic technology on women's availability for work. The final section considers the interrelationship between work, fertility decisions, and divorce.

This introductory chapter briefly reviews China's demographic transition, major demographic challenges, the development of population research in China, and the organization of the book. It provides useful background information of a wide range of issues examined in this book.

This chapter critically examines China's recent demographic data, especially the impact of the family planning programme on the quality of fertility data. It identifies various kinds of registration problems and shows that the quality of fertility data collected by some administrative organizations and those from recent censuses has deteriorated in recent years.

This chapter investigates changes in induced abortion and their relationship with the implementation of the family planning policies, the decline in fertility, and the rise of sex ratios at birth. It identifies a number of factors that have markedly influenced patterns of abortion. It shows that while the contribution of abortion to fertility decline is relatively small, it has a considerable impact on sex ratio at birth in many regions.

This chapter examines recent changes in age at first marriage and the proportion choosing marriage, their impact on fertility decline, and recent increases in divorce and remarriage. It provides the latest update on people's attitudes toward sexual relationships and marriage behaviours in China against a broad backdrop of changing marriage patterns around the world.

This introductory chapter discusses the ways in which historians and demographers have characterized and explained the fertility decline. It discusses the value of a systematic social history of the increased use of birth control using first-hand accounts from oral history alongside material collected by birth control campaigners, population surveys, and Mass Observation. It argues that men, just as much as women, need to be the focus of study. The strategies used to obtain oral history material in such a sensitive area are outlined and the range of methodological strategies employed in its analysis is revealed. The importance of dissecting the ways in which respondents organized and presented their memories is highlighted. Studying modes of self-presentation and elucidating the subjective meaning and cultural significance that individuals attach to their lives is shown to illuminate the identities which influenced beliefs and behaviour.