Asia-Pacific Population Journal - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2011

Sample surveys carried out during the last four decades have proven the existence of “unmet need”, a term coined to describe a significant gap between a woman’s sexual and contraceptive behaviour and her stated fertility preference. According to the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) definition, a woman has an unmet need for contraception if she is fecund, sexually active and not using any contraceptive method, and yet does not want a child for at least two years. If a woman is pregnant or amenorrhoeic after giving birth, she is also considered to have had an unmet need if she had not wanted the pregnancy or birth either when it occurred or ever (Ross and Winfrey, 2002).

During the early phase of the demographic transition in Sri Lanka (in the 1920s), the birth rate persisted at about 40 per 1,000 population, with the death rate fluctuating at around 20 per 1,000. A slight decline in the death rate was observed from the late 1920s onward. After the 1940s, the crude death rate dropped at an unprecedented level: about 1.5 deaths per 1,000 population per year on average, before reaching the level of 12 deaths per 1,000 population by the middle of the twentieth century (Caldwell, 1986).

When Ravenstein (1885) in writing on the “laws of migration” stated that each current of migration produces a compensating countercurrent, return migration has been acknowledged as important to any thorough understanding of migration. Yet, for many years the view of migration as primarily a one-way phenomenon dominated empirical inquiries. While studies have focused on the departure of migrants, the migration journey, arrival, settlement and integration, the return of migrants has received far less attention (King, 2000).

Demographic trends in many developing countries since the second half of the twentieth century are leading to an unprecedented increase in the absolute as well as relative size of older populations (aged 60 years and older). Simultaneously, rapid social and economic changes have occurred that have potentially profound implications for the future of the elderly. At the global level the number of older persons is projected to increase from 603 million in 2000 to 2 billion in 2050. The increase will be especially dramatic in less developed regions where the size of older populations will more than quadruple, from 370 million in 2000 to 1.6 billion in 2050 (United Nations, 2009).