Asia-Pacific Population Journal - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2007

The short answer to the question posed by the paper’s title is “no”, although any disease that kills millions should be combated with all the means available. I first addressed this question in an editorial in Social Science and Medicine a decade ago (Caldwell, 1995) and little has changed since then. That view is supported by the evidence found in major recent reports upon which this viewpoint is based (Stanecki, 2004; UNAIDS/ Read More

In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York, leaders of the world’s Governments signed the Millennium Declaration and committed themselves to a series of goals and targets that came to be known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Goals include reducing under-five mortality by two thirds (Goal 4) and reducing maternal mortality ratio by three quarters (Goal 5) between 1990 and Read More

In his frequently quoted article, Coale (1973) proposes that one weakness of the demographic transition theory is that it indicates a high degree of modernization as sufficient to cause a fall of fertility, without indicating the degree of modernization that is necessary. By summarizing the findings of historical studies of European communities, Coale proposed three broad conditions necessary for fertility transition. He argued that m Read More

To the Government of Singapore, the country’s declining marriage and fertility rates are serious national problems. It believes that those trends will have negative consequences for economic growth and Singapore’s overall quality of life in the future as Singapore faces a “greying population”. In 2003, there were 21,962 marriages registered, lower than 2002 (23,189), the 1990s (average 24,000) and the 1980s (average 23,000) ( Read More

International labour migration in Asia has experienced the most rapid growth in the last few decades. There are two major destination regions for labour migrants in Asia: Middle East and East and South-East Asia. In addition to countries of the Middle East, since the early 1980s we observe a sustained growth of foreign manpower in the prosperous countries of East and South-East Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, the Re Read More