The increasing importance of changes in nuptiality: policy mismatch and fertility decline in low-fertility Asian societies

Despite the strong relationship between marriage and childbearing in Asian societies, policies addressing “lowest-low” fertility have often prioritized parity progression within married couples while overlooking a concurrent and increasingly significant trend: the rising prevalence of delayed marriage and nonmarriage. Against this backdrop, we first discuss recent fertility trends and the role of marriage in declining fertility, then review policy efforts in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, arguing that these pronatalist policies have been mistargeted. We subsequently examine the extent to which the decrease in fertility is attributable to changes in marital fertility versus shifts in nuptiality. Our decomposition analysis of fertility trends using data from the United Nations Population Division shows that while a decline in marital fertility played a dominant role during the initial stages of the fertility transition, nuptiality has been the primary driver of decreasing fertility rates in recent decades. These findings highlight the importance of the growing incidence of singlehood and the potential, albeit modest, increase in diverse family forms, both of which have received scant attention in policy discourse.