Fertility Decline and the Role of Culture – Thailand’s Demographic Challenges for the 21st Century

Declining birth and death rates, changes in age distribution, in mortality and morbidity, in fertility and marriage behavior, in the average life expectancy and in family and household structures, as well as a transformation of traditional family life arrangements and social structures of ever larger sections of the population – these are all scenarios that only a few years ago were only relevant for countries of the Global North. In the meantime, however, demographic change has also affected parts of the less developed world with a vehemence and dynamism that, even in the 1980s, neither demographers nor politicians considered possible in the affected regions of theworld: the demographic transition, which is often also graphically illustrated through the well-known demographic transition model, has taken place much more rapidly in Southeast Asia in recent decades than in other less developed parts of the world. Accordingly, as the demographic transition progressed, the focus shifted to the demographic situation in Southeast Asia: Until the mid-20th century, population development in this region was still classified as a ‘demographic anomaly’ by many demographers. Around the middle of the last century, Wilbur Zelinsky (1950: 115), for example, commented on the demographic situation of Southeast Asia in comparison to that of India and China as follows: