This paper examines the relationship between the practice and the attitude toward elderly parents` support. Present living arrangements as well as types of economic support are used to indicate the actual experience of family support. Three various perspectives-namely, from parents, from children, from own future preference-regarding attitudes toward parental support are compared in order to delineate possible differences between general versus personal attitudes. Data are taken from "The Economic Development and Female`s Family Status" (NSC 83-0301-H-001-064; NSC84-2411-H-001-018). Stratified random sample of 500 Taiwanese married couples and 500 married females constitute our sample.
The result shows that co-residence between elderly parents and married children (63.5%), children`s support as major economic source for the elderly (60.5%) remain as the dominant forms of parental support in Taiwan. Attitudes toward parental support reveal interesting differences. Specifically, from parents` viewpoints, higher separate living arrangement and stronger desire of financial independence are observed in contrast with the children`s perspective. However, the most important difference is found from personal future attitudes toward the elderly support. 44% prefers separate living arrangement and economic independence when getting old. This proportion exceeds the conventional response of depending on the children for the elderly support. Therefore, the multivariate analysis which aims st exploring the association between behavior (actual experience) and attitudes of parental support adopts personal future attitudes as the dependent variable.
The findings support our hypothesis that current family structure and economic support patterns have significant effects on personal future attitudes toward the elderly support. Members from the nuclear family as well as those parents who have independent economy are more likely to favor similar support patterns in the future. Further analyses indicate that present living arrangement is more important for urban residents while present economic support pattern is more significant for rural residents in their future attitudes toward parental support. Hence, actual family support experience does have important association with personal future attitudes toward the parental support.

Based on information drawn from many large migration surveys carried out in mainland China, this paper analyses the impacts of recent migration, especially those in the category of "floating population" and related policy issues. It is argued that the plentiful supply of cheap migrant labor is crucial to China`s recent economic growth in the coastal region. While these influxes have burdened urban infrastructure and contributed to rising crime rates, there is significant scapegoating in the media and discrimination against peasant migrants in urban areas. Increasing marginalization of non-hukou migrant workers in Chinese cities also poses serious concern to urban social stability. Rural outflows have lessened population pressure and generally have limited negative impacts on agriculture at this stage. China needs to reverse its urban-biased policy, reform its household registration system and articulate a more coordinated policy on migration, integrating it into the national development strategy. Migration can be actively used as a tool to promote regional economic development and alleviate poverty.

In the past, immigrant impacts on Australia`s urban development was merely manifested in and restricted to inner-city enclaves. Recent changes in immigration however have seen some important distinctive impacts on urban development outside of inner-city. This paper argues that the settlement of affluent immigrants from Asia, especially those from the northeast region including Hong Kong and Taiwan, into traditionally high socio-economic, Anglo-dominated and culturally homogeneous dormitory suburbia, has brought many dramatic changes. Particularly apparent is the case of Sunnybank in Australia`s third largest city-Brisbane-where it was infused with consumber cosmopolitanism, accompanied by an increase in the intensity of commercial and recreational activities, and ultimately followed by a total transformation of the built environment.

This study attempts to present demographic characteristics and to analyze factors, problems and policy implications of Chinese migration from Macau, Hong Kong and Chinese Mainland to Taiwan in the last decade. Important demographic characteristics of migration covering the number, age, sex, educational and occupational composition are presented. Factors of migration include political, social, economic and policy aspects in Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong and Chinese Mainland.
Available data are mainly collected from official statistics in Taiwan, and related publications and documents. Result of this study can be used as the reference for related governments to introduced better migration policies and to enable people to make better decisions on migration.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the patterns of demographic and economic transition by types of settlement and region between the period of 1980-1989 and that of 1989-1992. After the unification of Germany in 1989, the demographic transition shows a dramatic trend. The fertility in East Germany dropped rapidly and a great number of people moved to West Germany. After 1992; the net migration rate declined and decentralization was even stronger; the population of central cities in agglomeration areas still lost population through migration. Types of settlement, region, and employment growth rate can significantly explain the variation of net migration rate between 1980-1992. There exist critical social mechanisms of regional and urban policies to react toward problems of demographic and economic transition. In these social mechanism, public and nonprofit sectors play the major roles in these social mechanisms. In public sector, the strategies to react toward demographic and economic transition are the restructuration of the relationship between central and local governments, constructing metropolitan regional governments, and use public-private partnership in infrastructure. The nonprofit organizations which shape regional and urban policies are interlocked with public sectors; different nonprofit organizations are also interdependent on one another. These social mechanisms of urban development indicate the characteristics of corporatist structure in Germany. In the future, these mechanisms will deal with two major issues of urban development: development or redistribution, racial integration or racial segmentation.

The labor market participation of divorced women in Taiwan, though not impressive, has been increasing since 1980. Despite the many similarities that divorced women in Taiwan share with the advance industrialized countries, no attempt has been made to apply the available labor supply models to study the labor market behavior of divorced women. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by investigating divorced women`s labor supply and the determinants of marital dissolution in Taiwan. Using the recent developments in economietric techniques and constructed data sets from DGBAS, labor force participation and hours of work are estimated under alternative specifications. The empirical results support the hypothesis that a wife has hedged the high probability of marital dissolution by increasing hours of work in the labor market to accumulate job experience. Therefore, we conclude that a 500- to 600- hour increase in the female annual hours of work can be attributed to 1% rising divorce risk. This research provides a new aspect in explaining the rise in females` hours of work shedding light on existing researches on female labor supply in Taiwan.

The protective services of the abused and neglected children have been improved a great deal in Taiwan ever since the amendment of the Child Welfare Act in 1993. Though, protection of the abandoned children is still an untouched area. This article intends to advocate the needs of improving the protection services of the abandoned children from the children`s right perspective. In the paper, it examines the children`s rights situation, and the status quo of the abandoned children problems. The paper concludes by claiming that "prevention is the best protection of abandoned children." Waysj of preventing child abandonment, modifying the relevant regulations and policies, and improving practice are suggested in the end.