Fertility adaptation by rural-urban migrants in developing countries: The case of Korea

The Impact of Neighborhood Environment on Women's Willingness to Have a Second Child in China

In recent years, the Chinese government has changed the one-child policy that was implemented more than 3 decades ago and has began encouraging couples to have 2 children. However, this cannot quickly change people's reproductive concepts after more than 30 years of low fertility rate and birth control. In this context, the aim of our study was to assess the effect of neighborhood environment on Chinese women's fertility-willingness for a second child. Our results show that there is a statistically significant relationship between neighborhood environment and women's fertility-willingness for a second child. Women living in affluent neighborhoods with better living environments have lower fertility-willingness for a second child than those in poor neighborhoods. However, childcare institutions (such as kindergartens) provide shared childcare and improve women's fertility-willingness. We suggest that to encourage more couples to have a second child, it is necessary to increase the number of neighborhood kindergartens. In addition, local governments must improve the social welfare of migrant households and loosen the requirements for migrant households to obtain local hukou, which will allow migrant children to enjoy local public services, especially education services.

Internal migration and health: premarital sexual initiation in Nigeria

The high rates of youth migration to urban and economic centers, in the context of persistent poverty and devastating HIV/AIDS burden, have raised intricate social policy challenges in developing countries. Using the 2008 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey data, descriptive statistics, Kaplan-Meier survival curves and discrete-time hazard regression models, this study examines the patterns of internal migration and sexual initiation among never-married Nigerian youth aged 15-24. We find that migrants generally show stronger association than non-migrants, and urban-rural and rural-rural migrants particularly show the strongest independent association with premarital sexual initiation. Other significant covariates are age, religion, ethnic origin, educational attainment, independent living arrangement, formal employment and exposure to the mass media. The findings highlight the direct importance of youth migration in understanding and addressing the challenges of premarital sexual behavior and the need for behavior change policies and programs to be sensitive to the complex contextual nuances across youth groups in one country.

The fertility impact of temporary migration in China: a detachment hypothesis

This paper expands the migration-fertility linkage literature by examining the fertility impact of temporary migration in Hubei, China. The central hypothesis is that temporary migration affects migrants' fertility through a detachment process: The separation of temporary migrants' actual residence from their de jure residence creates a loophole in family planning administration, weakening the social control over their fertility. The analysis of annual order-specific births since 1979 suggests that temporary migrants exhibit significantly higher probabilities of having a second birth than permanent migrants and nonmigrants once type of residence is controlled for: rural-rural temporary migrants have the highest fertility among all groups examined. The results lend support to the detachment hypothesis while indicating a strong antinatal impact of urban residence. Rural-urban temporary migrants are not the ones to blame for increases in outplanning births in contemporary China, but their fertility would have been lower if there had been no detachment. Rural-rural temporary migrants are actually the escapees of the one-child-per-family policy.