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This paper estimates the effects on rural education of the send-down movement during the Cultural Revolution, when about 16 million urban youth were mandated to resettle in the countryside. Using a county-level dataset compiled from local gazetteers and population censuses, we show that greater exposure to the sent-down youths significantly increased rural children’s educational achievement. This positive effect diminished after the urban youth left the countryside in the late 1970s but never disappeared. Rural children who interacted with the sent-down youths were also more likely to pursue more-skilled occupations, marry later, and have smaller families than those who did not.

Recent theories of low fertility emphasize the increasing importance of support for the family in changing gender roles toward egalitarianism. In a context of weak institutional support for families and low levels of gender equity, do family policies influence individual fertility? Moreover, might support from other sources, such as men's involvement in the family or grandparental childcare assistance, positively influence fertility intentions and behavior? I examine the influence of three sources of a supportive environment for families - the state, husbands, and parents or in-laws - on women's fertility intentions and behavior regarding second children. Using data from three waves of the Korean Longitudinal Survey for Women and Families, I measured supportive environments by knowledge of family policy, men's involvement in housework and childcare, and grandparental childcare assistance. I then studied these factors with binary logistic regression analysis. The findings suggest that supportive environments for the family have a stronger effect on fertility behavior than on fertility intentions. Women who are knowledgeable about childcare leave reserved for use by fathers are more likely to have a second child than women who do not know about it. Support from husbands for housework and childcare and intensive childcare assistance from coresiding parents or in-laws increase the likelihood of a second birth. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of the interplay between the welfare state and the family in studies of fertility. Moreover, the findings have unique implications for very low fertility in countries with limited and fragmented state support of families.

On the basis of research on paired Muslim and non-Muslim communities selected in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, the authors test the hypothesis that greater observed Muslim pronatalism can be explained by less power or lower autonomy among Muslim women. Indeed, wives in the Muslim communities, compared to the non-Muslim ones: 1) had more children, 2) were more likely to desire additional children, and 3) if they desired no more children, were less likely to be using contraception. However, the authors do not find that Muslim communities consistently score lower on dimensions of women's power/autonomy. Thus, aggregate-level comparisons provide little evidence of a relationship between lower autonomy and higher fertility. Individual-level multivariate analysis of married women in these paired settings similarly suggests that women's autonomy differentials do not account for the higher fertility, demand for more children, and less use of contraception among Muslim wives. These results suggest that explanations for Muslim/non-Muslim fertility differences lie elsewhere.

We examined factors related to attitudes toward marriage and the importance of having children in both the US and Singapore. Path analysis indicated that life dissatisfaction leads to materialism, and both of these factors lead to favorable attitudes toward marriage, which leads to greater desire for children. Further analysis indicated this model was effective in explaining the difference in desire for children between Singaporeans and Americans, whereby Singaporeans have lower life satisfaction, higher materialism, and lower attitudes toward marriage and children. Materialistic standards of success were also related to the emphasis women placed on potential marriage partners' earning capacity. As Singaporean women had higher materialistic standards, they also placed higher emphasis on potential mates' earning capacity. Results suggest a consideration of psychological variables such as life satisfaction, materialism, and mate preferences may lead to a better understanding of larger-scale socioeconomic issues, including low fertility rates among developed East Asian countries.

The history of coercive measures to control population growth in India is often reduced to a few politicians caught up in a domestic crisis. In fact, the practices thought to distinguish the Emergency period that began in 1975 developed over decades with the advice and encouragement of international and nongovernmental organizations. Coercion was countenanced not just between clinics and clients, but between countries, especially when Washington could use food aid as leverage. In both the United States and India, the leading proponents were concerned not just about poverty but with preserving their power--whether as castes and religious communities, or countries and \"civilizations.\" Together they overcame opposition to time-bound targets, incentive payments, and contravention of medical standards. These developments led to a disastrous campaign in 1965-67 to induce 29 million women to accept IUDs, and to the beginning of an international debate about how population policy might empower people rather than control them.

The conventional model of a rising divorce rate during the process of modernization is a staple element of the sociological theory of the family. This generalization is challenged, however, by traditional high-divorce societies, primarily in Islamic Southeast Asia, which have experienced a decline in divorce with modernization. In this study, based on micro-level survey data, the authors explore the social roots of marital disruption in Indonesia and Malaysia and in another Southeast Asian society, Thailand, which has not been identified as a high-divorce society. Comparable survey data from the 1970s (from the World Fertility Survey) allow for an in-depth analysis of traditional patterns of divorce before the rapid modernization of recent decades. Two major findings emerge from the multivariate analysis. First, there is a common pattern across all three societies of higher levels of divorce among \"traditional\" women-those who live in rural areas, marry at young ages, and have lower levels of education. Second, the authors find significant sociocultural (ethnic, regional, religious) differentials in divorce within each country that cannot be explained by demographic and socioeconomic composition. They present an interpretation of how moderately high levels of divorce were accommodated in traditional Southeast Asian societies.

This reproductive health review of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region provides an overview of the issues and establishes a base of knowledge upon which a strategy could be constructed. Despite achievements in the population and health sectors during the last decades, several reproductive health issues remain, while new challenges have emerged. Major reproductive health issues in the region include high maternal mortality, particularly in Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq; high fertility and slowing fertility decline; early marriage and high teenage fertility; the increasing prevalence of sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS; and female genital cutting in Egypt and Yemen. There is a correlation between reproductive health issues, a country ' s level of social development, and the size of gaps within a country; between men and women, urban and rural, rich and poor. Therefore, it is necessary to plan and implement programs targeted to specific issues and underprivileged groups; develop effective and sustainable health systems with high-quality services; raise awareness and change behaviors of both the public and policymakers; and empower women. Strong political commitment is essential to overcoming social and cultural constraints. Possible intervention components and possible roles of the World Bank are suggested.

Important information on demography, epidemiology, inter-population differences in growth, infant burial practices, and social aspects of the community can be gleaned from the study of perinatal bones. The increasing number of perinates unearthed from prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia provides a rare opportunity to investigate these issues. The high number of full-term infants represented at the site of Khok Phanom Di in Central Thailand (4000-3500 B. P.) remains an enigma. This is an important issue for bioarchaeologists as infant mortality patterns are sensitive barometers of the health and fertility of a population. This study investigated the perinatal age distributions of several chronologically spread sites in prehistoric Southeast Asia with differing subsistence modes and evidence of social complexity. Results show that the age distribution in the collection from Khok Phanom Di is different from the other skeletal samples, with a comparatively higher number of full-term perinates represented. Explanations including infanticide, issues of health and disease, and infant burial practices are considered. It seems likely that the age distribution results from different burial rites of pre-term infants as a consequence of social and cultural differences between Khok Phanom Di and the other sites. This study emphasizes the important contribution bioarchaeological research and the comparative study of infant burial rites can make in understanding aspects of social change in prehistoric communities. KEYWORDS: bioarchaeology, infant burial practices, perinatal age at death distributions, prehistoric mainland Southeast Asia, social organization.

In this reply to Arthur Wolf's critiques of their combined work, the authors focus on three central issues of Wolf's refashioned critique: the levels of pretransitional marital fertility, the patterns of reproductive behavior behind them, and the use of poverty to account for low Chinese fertility within marriage. They clarify his misrepresentations of their data, findings, and interpretations.

Recent evidence from East Asia suggests that parents use prenatal sex testing to selectively abort female fetuses, a practice manifested in rising sex ratios (males per females) at birth. Many observers have condemned prenatal sex testing, arguing that it results in discriminatory abortion against females. However, observers have neglected the dynamics between this new prenatal discrimination and traditional postnatal discrimination against young daughters. If the option of sex-selective abortion implies that daughters carried to term are more likely to be wanted, postnatal discrimination might decline. Evidence from East Asia is used to investigate this \"substitution\" hypothesis. In societies where excess daughter mortality existed in the 1970s, rises in the sex ratio at birth in the 1980s tended to be associated with declines in excess daughter mortality. This preliminary support for the substitution hypothesis suggests that judging the morality of sex-selective abortion requires prior consideration of the prevalence and relative evils of both prenatal and postnatal discrimination.