Five Decades of Household Change across Asian Societies

Huifen Fang , Centre D'Estudis Demogràfics (CED) at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Juan Galeano, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Centre D'Estudis demogràfics (CED)
Albert Esteve, Center for Demographic Studies (Barcelona)

Over the past five decades, Asian households have undergone significant transformations. This article offers a comprehensive exploration of these changes, considering the heterogeneities between countries from 1970 to 2021. Using data from 163 census or survey samples in 35 countries from the CoDB database, we scrutinize various household and family arrangement indicators over time, including average household sizes, distribution of different household sizes, aging structure in a household, and household composition by types and members. Our findings reveal a consistent and universal trend in Asian societies: continuously shrinking household sizes and growing aging household structures. Larger households have consistently decreased, while smaller households have become predominant. Notably, unipersonal households have kept increasing in some societies. Besides, even though nuclear-family households steadily account for a major proportion of all household types in Asia, a recent decrease in share has also been observed in some societies. Another remarkable change is the rapid reduction in the number of children, meanwhile, some countries also experiencing a decline in the number of spouses. Despite these shifts, Asian households have maintained a considerable percentage of stem-family households and a relatively large number of relatives in the households, reflecting enduring cultural and societal ties amidst evolving living arrangements. Meantime, living with non-kin members has not been common in the Asian context.

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course