I assess the population health effects in Malaysia of air pollution from a widespread series of fires that occurred in Indonesia between April and November of 1997. I describe how the fires occurred and why the associated air pollution was so widespread and long lasting. The main objective is to uncover any mortality effects and to assess how large and important they were. I also investigate whether the mortality effects were persistent or whether they represented a short-term, mortality-harvesting effect. The results show that the smoke haze from the fires had a deleterious effect on the health of the population in Malaysia.
In this article, I evaluate the hypothesis that higher infant and child mortality among Muslim populations is related to the lower autonomy of Muslim women using data from 15 pairs of Muslim and non-Muslim communities in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Women's autonomy in various spheres is not consistently lower in Muslim than in non-Muslim settings. Both across and within communities, the association between women's autonomy and mortality is weak, and measures of autonomy or socioeconomic status are generally of limited import for understanding the Muslim disadvantage in children's survival.
Using data from Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, we explore how gender context influences (1) husband-wife concordance in the demand for children and (2) the impact of each spouse's fertility preferences on contraceptive use. We also explore whether the husband's pronatalism can explain the wife's unmet need for contraception. The results suggest that gender context has little net effect on couples' concordance, but influences the relative weight of husbands' and wives' preferences in determining contraceptive use. Analysis of women's unmet need for contraception suggests that the husbands' pronatalism contributes to wives' unmet need, but only to a relatively small degree, especially in settings where unmet need is high. This is the case because the proportion of couples with differing fertility goals is small in most communities.
In this paper we discuss a number of hypotheses about motives for intergenerational transfers within the family. We use data on time and money transfers between generations in Malaysia, where there is neither Social Security nor Medicare, to explore these hypotheses empirically. We find evidence supporting the hypotheses that children are an important source of old age security and that old age security is, in part, children's repayment for parental investments in their education. This repayment is partly a function of the children's income and, in the case of females, a function of their spouse's income. We also find evidence supporting the hypotheses that parents and children engage in the exchange of time help for money.
With data from the Malaysian Family Life Survey, I use a continuous-state hazards model to study the impact of migration on the dynamics of individuals' careers. I distinguish between the effects of family migration and solo migration by gender. The results show that migration alters the career trajectory primarily by accelerating the process of occupational mobility rather than by increasing the level of occupational attainment. Further, the effect of migration on careers varies by type of migration, especially for women. Male-female differences in the outcome of family migration, however, are visible only in transitions into and out of employment.
Although the departure of children from the parental home is an important life-cycle event, few studies have investigated nest-leaving in developing countries. Using retrospective data from the Second Malaysian Family Life Survey, we estimate hazard models of nest-leaving in Peninsular Malaysia. We find that the departure of children, especially sons, responds to economic incentives, including housing costs, family businesses, education, and economic growth, and that ethnic differences in nest-leaving are important. We also find that the median age of departure from home has declined sharply over the past 40 years, a period of rapid social and economic change in Malaysia.
More than two-thirds of Malaysians age 60 or older coreside with an adult child. Data from the Senior sample of the Second Malaysian Family Life Survey (MFLS-2) are used to investigate which "seniors" (persons age 60 or older) live in this way. The analysis generally supports the notion that coresidence is influenced by the benefits, costs, opportunities, and preferences for coresidence versus separate living arrangements. For example, married seniors are more likely to coreside with adult children when housing costs are greater in their area or when the husband or wife is in poor health. This finding suggests that married parents and children live together to economize on living costs or to receive help with household services. Unmarried seniors who are better off economically are less likely to live with adult children, presumably because they use their higher incomes to "purchase privacy."
State planning plays a central role in Malaysia's social and economic development. The government's rural development policies are designed to promote agricultural incomes and help counterbalance ethnic inequalities. The Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) implements one of the internationally most successful land development and resettlement programs. In this article, we quantify the impact of FELDA settlements on local out-migration rates, linking macro and micro approaches and using data from the Malaysian Family Life Survey, national censuses, and other sources. A model of instantaneous migration rates specifies an individual's migration rate as a function of individual-level sociodemographic characteristics, the level of urbanization of the origin and destination, and the extent of rural development at the district of current residence. Our results show that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the existence of rural development centers in a district reduced the levels of out-migration to pre-1965 levels.
Household data from Malaysia are used to assess the roles of a number of mortality correlates in explaining the inverse relationship between the infant mortality rate (IMR) and socioeconomic development. Increases in mothers' education and improvements in water and sanitation are the most important household-level changes that accompany regional and temporal development and contribute to the inverse relationship between the IMR and development. One concomitant of development--reduced reduced breastfeeding--has kept the relationship from being even stronger. Continued prevalence of extended breastfeeding in the poorer states of Peninsular Malaysia and a narrowing of educational and sanitation differentials helped close the IMR gap between the richer and the poorer states.
This paper investigates the structure of the relationship between female education and fertility. It is based on data published in First Country Reports of the World Fertility Surveys for eleven countries--Costa Rica, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Panama, Fiji, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia. The cumulative marital fertility of educated women is shown to be similar in different settings. A lack of uniformity in the education and fertility relationship including the curvilinear nature of this relationship observed across countries is shown to be attributable to marked differences between countries in the average fertility of women with no education rather than to the presumed differences in the average fertility of the educated women. The structure of the relationship is shown to be similar across several developing countries. This analysis suggests that advancement in female education can be expected to influence fertility behavior even without simultaneous changes in other factors such as increasing opportunity for participation in the paid labor force in the modern sector.
Multivariate analysis of the 1974 Malaysian Fertility and Family Survey tests the hypothesis that an inverse relationship between women's work and fertility occurs only when there are serious conflicts between working and caring for children. The results are only partly consistent with the hypothesis and suggest that normative conflicts between working and mothering affect the employment-fertility relationship in Malaysia more than spacio-temporal conflicts do. The lack of consistent evidence for the hypothesis, as well as some conceptual problems, lead us to propose an alternative framework for understanding variation in the employment-fertility relationship, both in Malaysia and elsewhere. This framework incorporates ideas from the role incompatibility hypothesis but views the employment-fertility relationship as dependent not just on role conflicts but more generally on the structure of the household's socioeconomic opportunities.
Recent work with samples of black and white urban American women showed a clear behavioral sequence relating age at menarche to age at first intercourse to age at first birth. This paper shows that the linking of ages at menarche, intercourse, marriage, and first birth is a pattern which occurs in very diverse cultures. We present confirmatory data from the United States, Belgium, and Pakistan, and from Malay and Chinese women in Malaysia. We interpret our findings as indicating a biological process leading to (a) social interpretations of readiness for reproduction, and (b) persisting biological differences between early and late maturing women.
This analysis has identified several factors contributing to the dramatic decline in infant mortality since World War II in Malaysia, as well as one factor that prevented the infant mortality rate from declining even more rapidly. Our main findings are the following: On average, mothers' education more than doubled over the study period, contributing to the decline in their infants' mortality. In addition, the beneficial effect of mothers' education on infant survival appears to have become stronger over the study period. Hence, further advances in education should lead to further improvements in infants' survival prospects. Another analysis of these data (Peterson et al. 1985) found that education is somewhat more influential in affecting child mortality in low-mortality, high-income areas than in the opposite type of areas. Therefore, socioeconomic development may have complemented, instead of substituted for, the the beneficial effect of mothers' education in promoting infant and child survival in Malaysia. Improvements in water and sanitation also contributed to the infant mortality decline, especially for babies who did not breastfeed. However, unlike education, these influences have become less important over time, especially for babies who are not breastfed. Hence, further improvements in water and sanitation, a goal of Malaysia's Rural Environmental Sanitation Programme, may have smaller relative effects on infant mortality than did previous improvements. Targeting such improvements on areas where women breastfeed little or not at all, however, will increase their effectiveness in promoting infant survival. The substantial reductions in breastfeeding that have taken place since World War II have kept the infant mortality rate in Malaysia from declining as rapidly as it would have otherwise. We estimate that, in our sample, the detrimental effects on infant survival of the decline in breastfeeding have more than offset the beneficial effects of improvements in water and sanitation. Unlike some other researchers (e.g., Palloni 1981), we find that changes in fertility levels and in the timing and spacing of births have had negligible effect in explaining the decline in infant mortality within the samples we have considered. We have excluded births to older women from our analysis, however; this exclusion may have led to an understatement of the influence of changes in the age pattern of childbearing.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
This article examines retest reliability and digit preference in retrospective survey data on breastfeeding duration and type of supplementary food, covering three decades and reported by more than 1200 Malaysian women. Women with little or no education, rural residents, and those of Malay ethnicity are found to give less reliable data. In a logistic regression analysis, these respondent characteristics are more important determinants of data quality than the length of the recall period.
Using microdata from the 1970 and 1980 censuses, we specify and test multilevel models of fertility determination for four Southeast Asian societies--Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Social context is indexed by provincial characteristics representing women's status, the roles of children, and infant mortality. These contextual variables are hypothesized to have direct and indirect (through individual socioeconomic characteristics) effects on current fertility. The contextual variables account for a modest but significant share of individual variation in fertility and about one-half of the total between area variation in fertility. The women's status contextual variables, particularly modern sector employment, have the largest and most consistent effect on lowered fertility. The results based on the other contextual variables provide mixed support for the initial hypotheses.
Using logit techniques and data from surveys of the elderly conducted in 1984 under the auspices of the World Health Organization, this article investigates socioeconomic, cultural, and demographic determinants of living arrangements of the elderly. Having a spouse or children with whom to live has important effects on living arrangements. The results provide only weak support, however, for hypotheses based on modernization theory and point to the need for detailed data on transitions in living arrangements and for information about the younger generation as well as the older generation, both of which are involved in deciding who lives with whom.
Child mortality may affect spacing through biological and behavioral channels. The death of a child may elicit a desire to have another one soon; further, it may interrupt breastfeeding and shorten the sterile period following childbirth. The hypothesis that the child mortality-spacing linkage varies across parities, being strongest in the middle parities, is examined using microdata from Malaysia and the Cox-regression technique. The empirical results lend support to the hypothesis.
The pace of urbanization in Peninsular Malaysia was slower in the most recent intercensal interval, 1957 to 1970, than in the previous period, 1947 to 1957. Most of the small change in the rural-urban balance from 1957 to 1970 appears due to the growth of towns into the urban classification rather than to a redistribution of population into the previous urban settlements. A number of towns in Peninsular Malaysia do show exceptional growth from 1957 to 1970, but there seems to be no clear relationship between a city's size and its subsequent growth. The rural areas on the outskirts of the largest cities do show rapid growth, especially the periphery of the capital city. It appears that neither the classic model of urbanization based upon Western experience nor the over-urbanization thesis explain the urbanization process in Peninsular Malaysia.