The total fertility rate in Taiwan has declined since 1951, reaching half of the replacement level in 2011. The secular decline is obviously real, but a ＂tempo effect＂ has also worked to bring it down. Since fertility cannot shift indefinitely to later ages of childbearing, the total fertility rate can be expected to rise once the shift has become saturated. Bongaarts and Feeney (1998) proposed a model to correct this terminating effect of shifting age pattern on total fertility, but it appears to address only the shifting mean age of childbearing. The model neglected the effect of shifting variance of the age distribution on total fertility rate. To redress the problem, Kohler and Philipov (2001) developed a way to assess the effect of removing variance on total fertility rate. The remedy appears to focus on the outcome of the tempo effect, but pays little attention to the shifts in the age pattern of fertility itself. This study employs a simulation approach to capture both the effects of shifting mean age and variance of the age distribution on total fertility rate simultaneously. We first compute cohort completed fertility rate based on the observed age-specific fertility rates. We then adjust the age pattern of cohort fertility assuming a certain age pattern, and simulate the total fertility rates accordingly. The differences between the simulated total fertility rates and the actual total fertility rates over time are then considered as the results of shifting age pattern. We further adjust the cohort fertility to the averaged mean ages of childbearing while keeping the age pattern constant; the comparison between this new simulation and the earlier one amounts to the well-documented tempo effect.

The rapid increase in international students worldwide in recent years has reflected the fast expansion of the global higher education market and the gradual diversification of educational options. In the recent decade, the Taiwanese government has launched policies to internationalize higher education and to actively attract foreign students to study in Taiwan, and the number of foreign students in Taiwan has been rapidly rising. Although the conceptual framework proposed by Knight and de Wit is helpful in understanding the rationales of international students' transnational education choices, substantial empirical evidence is needed to examine the relative significance of these rationales and the factors generating the differentiation. There also remains to be tested the micro-level hypothesis of the push-pull model conceptualizing a migration decision as the result of a rational choice seeking the best option with the maximum utility. This paper analyzes foreign students' motives to study in Taiwan and the factors shaping their destination choices with a national foreign student survey data and focus-group interviews with foreign students at seven Taiwanese universities. The results show that foreign students' study choices were based mainly on academic, cultural and economic rationales. The weighting of rationales varied by students' countries of origin, language skills, economic sources, and levels of study. The visibility of the study countries and institutions on the global market of higher education, education resources and policies of sending and receiving countries, international relations and regionalization all take part in shaping the study choices of student migrants. These findings highlight the contextualization of study choices of international students and the characteristic of bounded rationality in migration decision making. The study further discovers that the decision to study abroad and the choices of destination country and institution are not necessarily tied in a vertical and lineal relation but are often coordinated in a recursive fashion. It lastly provides suggestions to Taiwan's current foreign student recruitment policy.

Objective: Because of the insufficiencies of the current theoretical and empirical endeavors for explaining the systematic relationship between demographic transition and epidemiologic transition, this study is an attempt to theorize and empirically test a demographic transition thesis for explaining favorable conditions for population health and subsequent epidemiologic transition outcomes in less developed countries. Methods: OLS regression and cross-tabulation methods were used to conduct a cross-national analysis of all available data from less developed countries. Findings: Demographic transition, as measured by global fertility and cultural transition, exerts robust positive effects on the index of favorable conditions for population health and subsequent epidemiologic transition outcomes regarding the communicable- to non-communicable diseases transition and communicable diseases- to- injuries transition. Conclusions: Theorizing and testing a demographic transition thesis of epidemiologic transition contributed to theory development and interdisciplinary research for bridging demography and epidemiology.Theory, research, policy implications and suggestions for future research were discussed.

Accidents are always the most important problem related to the safety of people. In this study, we attempt to explore the trend of the effects of accidents in terms of years of potential life lost and economic loss in the past 25 years. The Lee-Carter Model is used for exploring the trend of death rate. The time-varying mortality index from the Lee-Carter model is fitted by a time series model and nonlinear model to predict future accident mortality rate. The years of potential life lost is calculated based on information about life expectancy, and the Human Capital Method is used to figure out the economic loss caused by accidents. Finally, a time series ARIMA model is applied to predict the economic loss caused by accidents. The results show that accident mortality rate has trended upward, then downward in the past 25 years; it peaked at 70.04 deaths per 100,000 population in 1989, then declined after 1989 (1999 and 2009 are excluded due to the extraordinary events of the 921 earthquake and Morak typhoon). In addition, a time series model and nonlinear model are used for fitting a time-varying mortality index k(t), providing good results for predicting accident mortality rates from 2010 to 2011. Using the population of Taiwan in 2000 as a standard, the years of potential life lost per 1,000 population caused by accidents were 31.13, 21.44, and 10.06 in 1989, 1999, and 2009 respectively; the years of working life lost per 1,000 population were 29.56, 17.55, and 7.34 in those same years. The economic loss caused by accidents after adjusting for 2009 CPI peaked at 490.37 billion NT dollars in 1993, then began falling after 1999's 410.15 billion NT dollars, reaching 165.79 billion NT dollars in 2009. From 1985 to 2009, the economic losses caused by accidents declined 37.52%. In addition, the predictions of time series models show that, due to accidents, the years of potential life lost per 1,000 population were 8.86, 8.05, and 7.23; the working life years lost per 1,000 were 6.32, 5.52, and 4.72; and the economic losses were 147.55, 127.89, and 108.23 billion NT dollars from 2010 to 2012 respectively.