The Rising Importance of Nuptiality Change: Policy Mismatch and Fertility Decline in Low-Fertility East Asia

Jolene Tan, Princeton University
Qi Cui, London School of Economics and Political Science
Fumiya Uchikoshi, Princeton University

Despite the strong relationship between marriage and childbearing, existing policies aimed at supporting parenthood often prioritize parity progression within married couples while overlooking a concurrent yet increasingly significant trend: the rising prevalence of delayed and non-marriage. This study focuses on four low-fertility East Asian societies: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. In these societies, changes in nuptiality behavior play an important role in fertility change, and a variety of population policies have been implemented in response to their “lowest-low” fertility. Against this background, we first review existing policy efforts mitigating declining fertility, arguing that these pronatalist policies are mistargeted, before examining the extent to which the decrease in fertility is attributable to changes in marital fertility versus shifts in nuptiality. We conducted a decomposition analysis of fertility trends in these four low-fertility Asian societies using data from the United Nations Population Division and found that while the decline in marital fertility played a dominant role during the initial stages of the fertility transition, contemporary patterns highlight nuptiality as the primary driver of declining fertility rates. These findings underscore the importance of the rising prevalence of singlehood and the potential, albeit modest, increase in diverse family forms, both of which have received scant attention in policy discourse.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Fertility, Decomposition analysis

See paper.