The impact of nuptiality on fertility trends in peninsular Malaysia, 1957-1980

The main aim of the thesis is to carry out a systematic study of the relationship between nuptiality and fertility, comparing and contrasting the Malay and Chinese patterns in Peninsular Malaysia. The Indians, being a small and mixed group, are excluded. The study concentrates on the period 1957 to 1980. The framework of analysis is to examine the nuptiality behaviour of cohorts of women, controlling for their background and socioeconomic characteristics. With the cohort frame in mind, the study first concentrates on analysing the Malay and Chinese nuptiality patterns, using various multivariate techniques. It then moves on to relate the changes in nuptiality patterns to changes in fertility patterns or birth timing. In the final section, an attempt is made to clarify or explain the macro time trends in fertility and nuptiality in Peninsular Malaysia in terms of the observed patterns for cohorts. The findings are that the 1957-80 period was a period of great social, economic and demographic change. There was improvement in income levels, lower adult and infant mortality, higher levels of education and literacy, higher levels of urbanisation, and greater participation in work outside agriculture, such as in manufacturing and services. There was also evidence of decline in period fertility, which can be attributed to both increasing age at first marriage and lower marital fertility. The decline in period fertility was faster for the Chinese than the Malays. The shift to childbearing at older ages, which is currently taking place, has caused period fertility to fall below the underlying cohort fertility. The older age at first marriage and hence older age at childbearing of the Chinese compared with the Malays is giving a misleading impression of the extent to which the Chinese are reducing their completed family size. As yet, it is difficult to predict by how much family size is being reduced in Malaysia. The indications are that the postponement of births to later ages may now have reached a point where it is balanced by the making-up of births at older ages. Under these circumstances, if cohort fertility does not continue to decline, period fertility may stabilise and even rise above cohort fertility if younger cohorts continue to space their births closer together. For the Malays, there are signs that the period fertility had already begun to rise in the late 1970s. The Chinese period fertility may only start rising in the 1980s because they have delayed their marriages and births longer than the Malays