The Social Demography of Asian youth: A Reconstruction over 1950-1990 and Projections to 2025 by Peter Xenos with the assistance of Midea Kabamalan. East-West Center Working Papers, Population and Health Series, No. 102. May 1998. 86 pp.

Abstract

Much social change across Asia has focused on youth, and there is great current interest in youth policy, especially regarding reproductive health. The fullest understanding of these changes requires a comparative perspective over an historically meaningful period of time. The empirical approach of this research is to assemble a data set on youth changes that spans 17 Asian countries over the period 1950-1990, combined with projections of several important time series from 1990 to 2025. The diverse historical experiences of this array of countries fall into a distinct pattern that in this analysis is called the youth transition.

The relevant changes among youth during the Asian youth transition include: (a) common changes of a transitional nature (the demographic youth transition including the youth bulge, the nuptiality transition, the education transition, other transitions that are not measured with reliable comparative and historical data); (b) important and measurable changes of a more complex nature (e.g., labor force participation changes); (c) other important changes that are not measured in this work and perhaps cannot be except sporadically (e.g., age at menses, indicators of the sexual system, etc.). The demographic core of the youth transition is driven by the fertility transition and results in a one-time youth bulge. The youth share of total population shifts from about 16 percent (pretransition) to somewhere in the range of 20-24 percent (mid-bulge) and then to a stable post-transition level of about 12 percent many decades hence.

 

Across 17 Asian societies, the characteristics of the mid-transition youth bulge vary with the tempo of fertility decline and the total amount of fertility change (a function of the initial fertility level). The two key indicators are the youth share of total population and the youth population growth rate; these can be very high when fertility drops quickly from a very high level to a very low level (e.g., South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan). Latecomers to fertility transition (e.g., Indonesia, Philippines) are experiencing muted youth bulges. What will happen to the remaining countries (e.g., India, Pakistan) depends largely on the character of their fertility declines. These results bring out a trade-off of importance to planners: A rapidly played-out youth bulge is disruptive in the short run, but it generates a lower maximum number of youth than does a slower transition.

The magnitude of the youth bulge is but a part, sometimes a small part, of the overall youth transition faced by Asian societies. The social components of the youth transition--especially rising percentages single and rising percentages enrolled in school--produce dramatic growth rates for specific subgroups of the youth population. Three subgroup are examined in detail: (a) single out-of-school youth; (b) youth in the labor force among those out of school; and (c) youth not involved formally in either work or schooling institutions.