Demographic change in Southeast Asia
It has become well-known that the nations of Southeast Asia are among the most diverse to be found anywhere and that differences in ethnicity, standards and ways of living can vary significantly not just across borders but within individual states. While such a high level of diversity may be for many people a reason to celebrate the variations in the human experience, as well as an opportunity to close any gaps in income or life chances, from the governmental perspective it can be another problematic element in creating and implementing social policies that benefit the population as a whole.
It also can represent an additional parameter to be taken into account when trying to maintain balance between different ethnic groups. On the whole, processes of globalization, international pressure and increasing democratization have all acted to ensure that no Southeast Asian state can deliberately manage a country so as to promote the interests of one group over another. Myanmar was the last to hold out but has now been brought into the fold. Even so, countries as advanced socially and economically as Singapore and Malaysia must take constant care to ensure that tensions between groups arising from historical reasons does not spar into conflict as the result of any unfortunate incidents or the perception of the imposition of new forms of structural inequality. Crafting and implementing policy from this perspective requires both the provision of high-quality data and its interpretation. Unfortunately, of course, obtaining such data is difficult and expensive, especially in the Mekong region, and largely beyond the ability of the academic community to manage.
However, what can be done to investigate and think about the data that do exist and seek to draw such conclusions about different aspects as may be justified. This is the approach adopted by Lindy Williams and Michael Philip Guest, the editors of this informative and impressive compilation of papers about various aspects of demographic change in the region. This includes such issues as mobility, fertility, marriage and aging. Naturally, the various forces that are combining to cause changes in these areas are often transnational in nature and so there can be some commonalities across the region. It is in the interaction of such transnational forces and how they relate to location-specific factors resulting from geography and previously-taken economic and political decisions that results in variations across borders in so many unexpected ways.
The first chapter, by Charles Hirschman and Sabrina Bonaparte, is one of the longest and it seeks to provide a context for how and why population levels have changed in the region historically before, during and after the period of colonization. This is of course a very complex issue which could in itself be the subject of many volumes in its own right and so any attempt to provide a summary in just 40 pages is much to be welcomed. The approach adopted – which is one that is more or less consistent throughout the book – involves a close focus on the reliable data that might be assembled and then provision of a comparative analysis insofar as the data justify such discussion. Historical and economic factors are introduced when these add to the value of the analysis. However, the gaps in the historical record mean that conclusions drawn come close to conclusions which would be general for the world as a whole:
“Data on sex differentials with regard to life expectancy … show that females have lower mortality than do men at all ages in every country in the region. While some fraction of the female advantage in longevity is certainly biological, it is true for every society that gender differences in behavior and environmental influences account for much of this phenomenon (p.31).” While this is, of course, true and as acute an observation of the data as can be reasonably justified, it can nevertheless be frustrating that there is not more information available to draw more vibrant location-specific inferences.
This is an issue that recurs throughout the text, since all the authors are effectively obliged to rely upon the same sources of data to form their conclusions and each is trying to write about a subject that cannot really be separated from the others considered. For example, changes in patterns of aging clearly affect the proportion of dependents in the labour force overall and the amount of resources required to be transferred from people of working age to the elderly and, in turn, has an impact on the ability and willingness of younger people to marry and to have children and the need they may have to migrate elsewhere for better working opportunities. Since the authors follow the same basic mode of argument, featuring as mentioned data above and beyond theory, this can result in similar attempts aimed at trying to wring distinctive conclusions from the same interlocking set of elements and statistics. That the authors are also required to account for the same range of countries in each case – unequally represented because of the vagaries of data provision – has the effect of increasing this effort. From the perspective of the general reader, then, it might be better to take this book on a chapter-by-chapter basis rather than a single unified text. The same would presumably have been true had chapters been arranged on a country-by-country basis.
Nevertheless, within the book there are some outstanding examples of the distinctive characteristics of some particular areas compared to others. Gavin Jones and Bina Gubhaju, for example, describe the declining importance of polygamous marriage in Indonesia and explain this through the various institutional and economic forces involved. Meanwhile, Sara B. Curran and Noah Derman, in their chapter on population and the environment, are able to draw upon nature-related data and the ways in which people in different countries seek to take advantage of natural resources, which sets their discussion apart from the rest.
However, despite some methodological issues, this remains an important work aiming to draw together the whole range of demographic changes across a region containing half a billion people occupying a very diverse range of lifestyles and scope for improvement. Perhaps the most memorable conclusion to be drawn from reading the book lies in realizing just how interconnected all the various forces and peoples are and how difficult it is to identify appropriate policies in such a situation. Every form of social policy is at least to some extent conceived of as being crafted and implemented in something of a vacuum and then the results observed. However, in reality, even the act of thinking about and formulating policy creates reasons for and conditions of change that can travel more swiftly and extensively than the policy-making processes could ever hope to match.
John Walsh, Assistant Professor, Marketing and Communication, Shinawatra International University (jcwalsh@siu.ac.th)