This research employs one percent of random sample from the 1990 Census data in Taiwan area. After programming the nested data with around 50 thousand household units, this research estimates the proportion of single-parent households over the overall households (including single-person household) as 3.9%。 Besides, using the households consisting of children under 18 as the denominator, I re-estimate the figure as 6.5%.I also calculate the proportion of children who were living with single parents, and obtain the figure 5.4%－that is, one of every 18 children in Taiwan lived with single parents in 1990. These figures are calculated under the welfare-oriented definition of‘single parent family` ,in which parents are either divorced, widowed, or single, with unmarried children aged under 18 living together.
The male-female sex ratio of single parents is 4 to 6. In Taiwan, most single fathers are divorced, while single mothers are largely due to divorce as well as widow. In 1990, 70.6% single fathers were employed and about half of single mothers had jobs. In this paper, we also report the frequency and percentage distribution of ‘single-parent household` by 23 administration districts in Taiwan.

Ageing has been regarded as an important social concern for Taiwan. This paper extends research on the difference in ageing factors between Taipei City and Taiwan`s rural area in terms of the changes in fertility, mortality, and mirgration rates. The equations developed by Preston et al. have been adopted to decompose the rate of ageing measured by the mean age. The analysis--based on data collected from 1968-1993 demographic data in Taiwan-Fukien Demographic Fact Book, Republic of China--provides strong evidence that population process (fertility, mortality, and migration) has different influence on their population ageing of Taipei City and Taiwan's rural area.
Being compared with ageing in overall Taiwan area, the suppressive effect of changes in natural factors (including birth and death rates) on ageing of rural area is stronger than that of overall Taiwan area, and it is also larger than that of Taipei City.
However, the social factor (migration) shows pulling up ageing in rural area while it presents pushing down ageing in Taipei City.

This study is based on a survey of 5,046 elderly citizens residing in Taiwan in 1988. It is aimed to find out if living arrangements play a role of intervening or specification variable. To fulfill this goal, primary and secondary sources of living costs are used to derive four types of economic supports for the elderly. They are independent, supplementary, semi-dependent and dependent types. We are surprised to note that only 43.3% of the elderly are solely dependent on their children. The semidependent type, supplementary type and independent type account for 14.8%, 18.6% and 15.0% respectively. Our analytical results suggest that living arrangements play a role of specification. Of the elderly who are not living with children, these have substantially greater proportions of the independent type than those living with children.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the nature and the structure of elderly women’s dependency condition and the underlying socio-cultural-political forces. From the social constructive perspective, we focused on three constructive forces－the Chinese patriarchal/patrilocal family system, the gender role, and the state policy on elderly welfare. Three types of dependency－economic dependency, dependency for personal and health care, and living arrangement were examined. The nature of dependency which related to inter- vs. intra- generational relationship, and to the public vs. private/family provision is also our emphasis. By reanalyzing the existing official statistics and research report, we discovered four major findings: 1/Women`s familial roles have confined them to private social space, and their disadvantaged economic conditions and needs have been invisible and ignored in the public policy discourse; 2/Due to “the patrilineal living arrangement”, “high prevalence of widowhood”, and “the lack of longterm care services”, elderly women have had to depend on their sons and daughters-in-laws for varieties of needs; 3/Women’s high dependency on sons and daughters-in-laws creates great tension between in-laws and affect the well-being and social rights of these two generations of women; 4/Different problems and faced by women of different cohorts due to rapid social and political changes in Taiwan. Their specific needs for social services have also been ignored.

In Taiwan, the rate of women’s labor participation is significantly lower than that of men’s, more importantly, the modes of job career also differ between sexes. The women’s roles on the family life cycle have been recognized as the primary explanatory factors for these differences. This research attempts to explore the modes of women’s job careers in Taiwan. Using the 1991 wave of “Taiwanese Social Change Surveys” data, we adopt the information regarding married female respondents’ job history since their marriage and found four major modes of job careers in terms of family life cycles: never-stop, stop-after-marriage, stop-after-birth, and never on job. They are accounted for 88.1% of the sample in the study. These findings do not confirm the conventional “M” type of women’s job career argued by previous studies. We further explore the explanatory factors (including individuals’ traits, family background factors, and current family statuses) with the multi-nominal logistic models. Among them, respondents’ schooling, mother whether on job during their childhood, number of children, marriage age, and cohorts are found strongly related to the patterns of job careers. Among women of older cohort, never-on-job and never-stop-job are the major modes of job career.

Based on the cohort component projection, this paper simulates the effects of fertility compression on birth sequence and age composition in Taiwan, and explores the implications for social welfare. As a first step, we fix the fertility schedule on the age pattern of 1956 while leaving the TFR to shift as it was, simulate the single year of age population groups from 1956 to 1992. It is determined that the projected birth numbers are smaller due to the fertility compression combined with the shifting age composition in the real series. It is also shown that the simulation results in a smaller, though not significant in magnitude, old-age dependency ratio than the real series.
As a second step, we subsequently assumed a fixed age pattern of fertility, a compressed pattern and an expanded pattern in a projection of five year of age groups from 1997 to 2097. Given a constant dollar and a base year population at 1992, it is shown that the variation in fertility schedules can bring about a change, ranging from 220 million to 17 million, in total maternity payment of 21,345 NT per live birth, and a change in the range of 1.1 billion to -90 million in total child allowance of 3,000 NT per month per head for the first three years after birth, and a change of zero to 5.6 billion in total pension payment of 8,500 NT per month per head.

This paper studies the inter- and intra-provincial migration patterns, major streams, the demographic characteristics of migrants and their reasons based on the 1990 100% China census. Under the government efforts of moving the market economy, the household registration system gradually loses its function. The social and economic impacts of significant size of floating population to cities are addressed.