Perception of Family and Work in Low-Fertility East Asia

This book is the first of its kind to incorporate subjective well-being (SWB) data to comprehensively explore perceptional factors that relate to fertility behavior in East Asia. The advantage of SWB data lies in the accessibility to rich information regarding perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. With this advantage, the book inquires into the perceptions toward family and work and explores the attitudes that lead to low fertility in the region.

To this end, first a comparative analysis with international cross-sectional data is performed and the East Asian characteristics of family and work perceptions are documented. Then, three democracies in the region are focused on-Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan-to investigate the relationships between cultural orientations, work-life balance, and fertility outcomes with panel data. In addition, East Asian results are compared with those in India, which has also been experiencing a rapid transition from a traditional society to an industrial one. The results support the idea that the friction between persistent gender-based role divisions and socioeconomic transformation in East Asia makes it difficult for women to balance family and work, prompting fertility decline to the lowest-low level in the region.

Junji Kageyama is a Professor of Economics at Meikai University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Osaka University and served as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the Vienna Institute of Demography, and the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in the areas of demography, behavioral economics, subjective well-being, and bioeconomics, with a current focus on introducing happiness studies into demography and economics. His published research includes analyses of savings and lifespan, time discounting behavior, happiness and life expectancy, the financial burden of children, and the age-trajectories of dissatisfaction and preferences. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Population Studies.

Eriko Teramura is a professor at Meikai University in Japan. She received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences from Ochanomizu University. Her areas of expertise are human resource management, labor economics, and gender studies. Her experience in the private sector has given her a unique perspective regarding family dynamics, demographics, and corporate labor issues. Her main interest is in examining gender disparity within the private sector. In addition to this book, she has co-authored 'Wellbeing and policy in Japan,' Briguglio M., et.al (ed.) 'Wellbeing and Policy: Evidence for Action'(2023 (in press), Routledge), and other Japanese books such as 'Women's work and Japanese workplaces: workplace atmosphere and women's work styles after the Equal Employment Opportunity Law'(2022, Koyo Shobo).