Families in Southeast and South Asia W. Jean Yeung 1 , Sonalde Desai 2 , and Gavin Jones 3 1 Email: socywj@nus.edu.sg, Department of Sociology, Asia Research Institute and Centre for Family and Population Research, National University of Singapore 2 Email: sonalde.desai@gmail.com, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland College Park and Senior Fellow, National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. sonalde.desai@gmail.com 3 Email: gavinj881@gmail.com, School of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T 2601, Australia 1
Families in Southeast and South Asia Abstract Southeast and South Asia are home to one- third of the world’s population. Their great economic and cultural diversities make generalization about family patterns and trends hazardous. We review literature on trends in fertility, marriage, divorce, and living arrangements in the past half century. Explanations for these changes focus on structural and ideological changes related to socioeconomic development, cultural factors including kinship system, religion and ethnicity, and public policies. While the impact of rapid modernization and related ideational changes are evident, there are also changes, or lack thereof, that cannot be explained by development. These trends are evident: (1) declining fertility and rising age at marriage, although teenage and arranged marriages remain common in South Asia, (2) kinship patterns seem slow to change, with bilateral system characterizing Southeast Asia and a majority of elderly living with or supported by their children. Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing are relatively rare in this region. Keywords Family, development, fertility, marriage, culture, kinship 2
Southeast and South Asia are home to one- third of the world’s population. Countries in this region have undergone uneven development in the last half a century, providing a unique perspective on the intersection of culture, industrialization, public policies, and globalization in shaping the meaning and functioning of the family system around the world. Trends in South and Southeast Asia are distinct from those in the West and in East Asia. While in many of the East Asian societies, fertility rates have fallen to an ultra-low level and over one-third of the adults remain unmarried by the age of 40, in certain South and Southeast Asian countries, marriage remains near universal with child marriage and consanguineous marriages being common, though receding, and total fertility rates still around 3 or higher. In contrast to the patriarchal system in East Asia, the bilateral kinship systems characterizing most Southeast Asian countries are more diverse and flexible. Extended families remain prevalent and the elderly are more likely to reside with their adult children as compared to older adults in other parts of the world. Unlike western societies, cohabitation, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births are not prevalent in these regions. In this paper, we review trends and summarize literature on fertility, marriage, divorce, and living arrangements in Southeast and South Asia in the past few decades and provide explanations for these changes. The explanations include both structural and ideological changes related to (1) economic development, (2) educational and human development including women’s education, labor force participation and gender relations, (3) cultural factors including kinship system, religion, ethnicity, and caste system and (4) public policies. We draw on several theoretical frameworks to examine the extent to which they explain changes in families in this region. The global development or modernization theory argues that structural forces such as industrialization, urbanization, and advancement in education will lead to a global convergence to a nuclear family form at the replacement level of fertility (Goode 1963, Parsons 1942). Other scholars have called for including ideational factors to better explain family changes around the world. The developmental idealism paradigm posits that the modern form of family seen in Western Europe and United States is considered as desirable and will spread to other regions as societies develop (Thornton 2001, Thornton 2013). Lesthaeghe and colleagues have argued that changes in religiosity and secularization foster an orientation toward individual growth and gratification which explain the postmodern family behavior and prevalence of patterns such as cohabitation, high divorce rates, below replacement fertility, and non-marital childbearing - what they have labeled as the “second demographic transition” (Lesthaeghe 1983, Lesthaeghe & Neels 2002). They later hypothesize that such behavior will also spread to other parts of the world. To contextualize changes in South and Southeast Asia, we first provide some key developmental indicators in the past few decades for this region in Table 1. Massive population growth has occurred in the region since 1970, from just over 1 billion to almost two and a half billion in 2015. Southeast Asia currently has about 640 million people, accounting for 8.5% of the world population, (World Bank 2015a) spread across 11 countries lying east of the Indian sub-continent and south of China. While these countries share some common historical and 3
culture features, diversity has always been a feature of the region (Hirschman 2001). Indonesia has the largest population in Southeast Asia, at 258 million people in 2015 or 41% of the region’s population. The Philippines and Vietnam follow at around 100 million, and Thailand and Myanmar at above 50 million. South Asia hosts about a quarter of the world population and is its most densely populated region. With a population of 1.3 billion, India is the world’s secon d most populous country. Two other countries in South Asia also have large populations - Pakistan (189 million) and Bangladesh (161 million). Countries in Southeast Asia have undergone rapid economic growth over the past few decades although the growth rates have been variable (see Table 1). Singapore and Brunei are outliers, now among the world’s wealthiest, with GDP per capita (PPP adjusted, in 2011 international dollar) figures at about US$80,000 and $74,000 respectively in 2015, significantly higher t han the OECD average of US$40,000. Singapore’s per capita GDP has more than doubled in the past two decades, as has Malaysia’s and Thailand’s, currently at about $25,000 and $15,000, respectively. Indonesia has reached a per capita income of just over $10,000. The other countries, still have a GDP per capita below $10,000 though they also experienced high growth. South Asian countries are at an even lower developmental stage, with most countries having GDP per capita below or near $10,000 and Nepal and Bangladesh near $2,000. This heterogeneity is also reflected in the composition of the respective economies, with agriculture dominating in Myanmar, India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Laos, while the manufacturing and service sectors play important roles in Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia. One trend that affects the family system significantly is the increase in the female labor force participation rate (FLFPR). Although we typically expect a U-shaped curve of female employment, with more women employed in agricultural economies, a decline in the FLFPR with economic growth, and then a rise in the FLFPR as services emerge, this trend is not true for this region (Dasgupta & Verick 2017). The FLFPR is high in Nepal and Laos, moderate in Singapore, and low in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The less-developed Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam) have continued to have FLFPR at about 80% since 1990. Thailand also had a high FLFPR (76%) in 1990, which declined to the current level of 63%. In contrast, countries in South Asia, except for Nepal and Bhutan, have much lower FLFPR. India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have FLFPR lower than 30%. Cultural factors are, no doubt, part of the explanation. Also, increasing crowding in agriculture combined with limited non-agricultural opportunities, have led to stagnation and even a decline in the FLFPR in South Asia, e.g. the Indian FLPR fell from 35% to 27% between 1990 and 2015 (Dasgupta & Verick 2017). A significant phenomenon observed throughout this region is the rapid rise in female educational enrolment rates, with the greatest differences between countries seen in tertiary rather than primary education. This has been shown to relate to lower fertility and delayed marriage. All countries have experienced substantial improvements in education. Singapore and Thailand experienced very rapid growth in female tertiary enrolment ratios, from below 5% in 1970 to 94.5% and 57.3%, respectively in 2015, leaving behind the Philippines which was well ahead of them in 1970, even though its ratio also doubled to 40% in 2015. Significant increases were also observed for the other Southeast Asian countries in the mid-1990s, but in most of these 4
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