Dynamic disequilibrium: demographic policies and trends in Asia

The authors present an overview of anticipated population trends and policies in the developing countries of Eastern and Southeastern Asia. Attention is given to various population projections to the years 2000 and 2025, the sources of these projections, and the assumptions on which they are based. The population policies of 14 countries in the region are then discussed. It is noted that those countries with no commitment to support family planning are not likely to reach fertility levels in line with those on which U.N. population projections are based. Changes in population policies in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines are summarized.     

What divides the first and second generations? Family time of arrival and educational outcomes for immigrant youth

In this article, I develop a measure of host country experience, which I call “relative time of arrival,” to explore differences between first- and second-generation immigrants. This measure is finer than immigrant generation and expands on the widely used measures of years since migration and age at migration. It is scaled so that zero indicates that a child was born in the same year that the family migrated, and the negative side of the scale measures parents' host country experience before the child's birth. I then use relative time of arrival to assess whether parents' host country experience before birth matters and generally find that it does not. I also study the dividing line between the first and second generations, specifically, whether there are differences in educational outcomes between early arriving first-generation immigrants and second-generation immigrants whose parents arrived shortly before birth. For most outcomes considered, I find that the transition between the first and second generations is relatively smooth, indicating that these groups are not as distinct as often thought. Thus, observed differences between the first and second generations are driven by the lower performance of late-arriving first-generation children.