Quality Education

Thailand is among a growing number of developing countries that are experiencing a sustained decline in fertility from former high and relatively stable levels. In the case of Thailand, the reduction in birth rates has been both rapid and pervasive. During the last two decades, the total fertility rate (TFR) fell from a level of between 6 and 7 births per woman to a level of close to 3 per woman. According to a recent United Nations assessment, Thailand’s fertility decline during the last two decades ranks as the third largest, behind only China and the Republic of Korea, among the 15 most populous developing countries of the world (United Nations, 1985).

Ethnic minority groups traditionally live on the fringes of society. In Thailand, an increasing number of them in recent decades have shown willingness to participate in the country’s development and to take their place closer to the mainstream of society. From the Government’s perspective, the main concern has been to address the major problems traditionally associated with the hilltribe population, i.e. opium cultivation and drug addiction, national security issues, conservation of natural resources and environmental degradation. Throughout the past few decades, population registration has become one of the most important issues related to the hilltribe people of Thailand, together with the general question of whether or not indigenous people or ethnic minority groups may become full citizens.

One of the notes prepared by the secretariat for consideration at the forty-second session of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) focuses on a variety of issues related to population and human resources. Among these are human resources for population and family planning programmes, and the role of ESCAP in developing human resources for such purposes. The aim of the paper is to discuss the types of investments in human resources that are likely to contribute to a continued decline in fertility in the Asian and Pacific region.

One of the purposes of family planning programmes in developing countries is to provide for the unmet needs of couples for contraception. In KAP (knowledge, attitude and practice) surveys, a large proportion of women usually state that, even though they want no more children, they are not using contraception. Under such circumstances, it is usually assumed that, if contraceptive methods were to be made easily available to them, many women with unmet needs for contraception would adopt those methods. In reality, however, this does not always happen. Nevertheless, in many East Asian countries, following the introduction of family planning programmes, fertility has reached the replacement level. The fertility transition is under way in some Asian countries, but it has yet to begin in others (Caldwell, 1993). In fact, such variations in fertility, despite the wide-spread availability of contraceptive methods, raises the issue of whether existing family planning services need to be modified.

When a data set is generated from a country-wide survey, it is important to test it to determine whether or not fertility variations are due to the structure of the data. Generally, small area data are more or less homogeneous in nature. This observation is supported by Garner and Diamond (1988) who pointed out that individuals who share similar characteristics related to fertility behaviour, such as living in the same geographical area, are likely to act in a similar fashion. There may be fertility variations between small areas in Bangladesh, but these have been generally ignored in previous studies (see, for example, Islam and Khan, 1991, 1995; Khan and Raeside, 1994; Amin and others, 1995).

Asia is in the midst of social transformations that are dramatic in pace and effect. Families, schools and labour markets are all changing, generally in ways that broaden opportunities for young people and may ultimately alter relationships between the sexes. An important element of these changes is the pattern of delayed marriage, coupled with higher rates of permanent celibacy, that have emerged throughout much of the region (Xenos and Gultiano, 1992).

Intervention programmes aimed at reducing child labour need to focus on both alleviating poverty and increasing literacy

Elderly people (those 65 years of age or older) comprise one of the largest and most rapidly expanding minorities in New Zealand. Since 1945, their number has more than doubled, from 147,219 to 316,197 (de facto definition) in 1981.

Contraception plays the most prominent role in reducing fertility in Bangladesh.

Population growth may impinge on the process of sustainable development of the pastoral economy.