Search

An electrophoretically slow hemoglobin variant, in which the structural change involves the replacement of a glutamyl residue by alanyl at position beta-22, was reported in two groups of North American Indians: hemoglobin-G Coushatta, in Alabama-Coushatta Indians in Texas; and hemoglobin-G Saskatoon, in descendants of Santee Indians living in Canada. Hemoglobin-G Hsin-Chu, found in Taiwan in a Chinese from the northern Chinese province of Liaoning, is now shown to have the same structural anomaly.

A variety of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics is known to vary consistently along the rural-urban continuum in highly developed nations such as the United States. Relatively little is known, however, about such variations in underdeveloped countries. In an effort to throw further light on this subject, the present paper examines the relationship of selected socio-demographic variables defining "urbanism" to a rural-urban continuum constructed for Taiwan. The results of the analysis suggest (1) that the theoretical applicability of the continuum concept is just as valid for under-developed areas as it is for countries such as the United States, and (2) that from a methodological point of view, a more realistic approach to the construction of a rural-urban continuum is one that utilizes both population size and administrative type in the classification of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an examination of how markets in Taiwan present new opportunities for American businesses. The author discusses the efforts made by the U.S. to increase their number of trading partners in Europe and the Far East. The author examines the investment climate of Taiwan, discussing the advantages and disadvantages that the country presents when compared to other underdeveloped countries. He examines the country's economic growth, industrial development and overall political climate. He discusses Taiwan's government policy for foreign investment and various import and export restrictions.

Throughout most of this century, Taiwan has experienced a rapid rate of urban growth due to the combined effect of a high rate of natural increase and a continual flow of people from the rural areas to the cities. Taiwan is not unusual in this respect as most other underdeveloped nations have experienced similarly high rates of urban growth. However, the study of urbanization in Taiwan is of particular interest for three reasons. First, among underdeveloped nations, Taiwan is one of the very few to have experienced rapid economic growth. Between 1953 and 1970 the economy grew at about 7 percent per year, industrial production increased eight-fold, and there have been substantial increases in real wages. Second, industrial growth has been accompanied by increased agricultural productivity and land reform. These changes have resulted in a reduction of some of the rural population pressure which might have resulted had the rapid population growth occurred without increases in yield and with the disparities in land ownership which existed prior to the 1953 Land-to-the-Tiller Act. The combined effects of rapid industrial growth and improved rural conditions may have been to give the rural resident more of a choice between staying in the rural areas and moving to the city than is afforded in most developing countries. Third, Taiwan is one of the few nations to possess a household registration system which is sufficiently accurate and complete to permit a detailed study of the urbanization process from official records. The Taiwan household registration system provides both a continual record of the population and a record of all reported moves made by the population. While some moves, especially those of short duration, are not reported, a sufficiently high proportion of all moves is reported to permit the use of these records in the study of migration in Taiwan. In the first part of this paper we shall make use of published data from the household and migration... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how fathers perceive the economic costs and benefits of raising children and how these perceptions influence preferred number of children and contraceptive use. Interviews were conducted for this study in 1969 with an island-wide sample of 2200 Taiwanese husbands. Analysis indicates that a complex of cost and benefit considerations has an appreciable net effect on reproductive attitudes and behaviour, after socio-economic status and demographic characteristics have been taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan has attracted a considerable amount of demographic interest in recent years because of a marked decline of fertility since 1956. In this paper the authors utilize data from the household registration system to analyse variations of fertility among 292 local administrative areas in 1961. The study reveals a strong negative correlation between total fertility and a series of indicators of social development and communication. Most of the variation in fertility is accounted for by differences in the fertility of married women aged over 30 and in the age at marriage. The decline of total fertility is accounted for primarily by a reduction of the marital fertility of women over 30. The adoption of family limitation was by no means confined to urban centres, but apparently originated there and spread rapidly to small towns and rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I investigate approaches to the interpretation of 6 years of aggregate economic and demographic data for the populations of 361 small administrative regions of Taiwan. My purpose is to obtain more information on the dynamic structure of a model of fertility variations, disequilibria, and changes that will make better sense of population problems and policy options in low-income countries. Although not wholly unexpected, given the scarcity of analytical tools and the shortage of data relevant to this task, few firm conclusions emerge. Age-specific birth rates for a cross section of small communities over time were analyzed to infer the responsiveness of birth rates in Taiwan to changing economic, demographic, and policy constraints. There are sound reasons to also consider information on individual reproductive behavior over time, since most models of fertility determination presuppose a relation between fertility and the number of living children parents have and the immediate and lifetime circumstances of the parents. Lacking longitudinal data for individuals, I have explored two methods for extracting information about the dynamic process of birth-rate determination from an integrated treatment of a time series of aggregate cross sections. Priority should be given to extending the static equilibrium theory of household time allocation and decision making to allow the introduction of dynamic elements of innovation, search and information costs, the biological and behavioral constraints on the supply of children, and the longitudinal complexities of intergenerational savings and transfers. Theoretical progress in these directions and more extensive empirical analyses of aggregate and individual time series might improve substantially our understanding of both the economic and demographic behavior of the household sector during the process of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it is to present the secular trends of fertility decline in Taiwan, pointing out that family-planning programmes began only after the birth rate had already shown a substantial decline. Secondly, it is to evaluate specifically the impact of family-planning programmes in the Taichung area, since its "success" has been widely proclaimed and led to an extension of the programme to the whole country. Thirdly, the authors argue that the dynamics of Taiwanese fertility changes may be related to declining infant mortality and accelerating educational development, and that these institutional effects, rather than the family planning programme, should be given credit for changes in fertility. The evidence shows that Taiwan's fertility was neither induced nor accelerated by the programme. This fact was especially obvious in Taichung city, where the action programmes were concentrated. Among the villages, the standardized partial regression coefficient of infant mortality was significant in many time periods. Yet, the effect of education on fertility was rarely significant, until the later periods. For the urban townships both infant mortality and education are found to be significant; however, educational level maybe more important in determining fertility than mortality decline.

This paper takes a look at the belief that the number of couples currently desiring to limit family size is sufficiently large that the provision of supplies, services and education will be adequate to bring the birth rate down to acceptable levels within a reasonable time period. Current family planning programmes emphasize the provision of supplies, services and education. Attempts to change motivation through the use of monetary incentives have raised a very minor role so far. Implicit in this ordering of priorities must be the belief that the number of couples latently or actively desiring to limit family size is sufficiently large - or can be made sufficiently large through education and persuasion - to bring the birth rate down to acceptable levels reasonable soon. A debate is in progress about the extent to which the official family planning programmes in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have been responsible for the fall in their rates. Monetary incentives were not widely or intensively used in these programmes. While there is no doubt that they speeded up the process of demographic transition, it is not clear how successful they would have been had they been initiated ten or twenty years earlier, before the socioeconomic situation became favorable.

This paper discusses and presents data obtained through various studies and surveys on the effect of the IUD contraceptive programme in Taiwan. It has been demonstrated that the fertility of IUD acceptors before first acceptance was 58% higher than that of married women in that, after acceptance, it declined by about 76%. The corresponding fertility decline among married women in general was only about 5%. Acceptors had had more recent births, as indicated by their shorter `open interval' of 207 months, compared with 374 months among the women in the KAP survey sample. If the fertility of IUD acceptors had declined at the same rate as that of married women in general in the absence of IUD, the insertion of about 4 IUDs would probably prevent one birth in the following year. Observation over a longer period, however, is needed to determine the demographic effect of lUD. Data on fertility control practice after termination, type of termination of pregnancies after first acceptance, life-table rates by various socio-demographic characteristics of acceptors, and the `life expectancy' of the first segment of IUD are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the personality structure of Chinese college students in Taiwan and Hong Kong, China. It is generally recognized that the social environment in which a person lives usually imposes on him certain awarenesses that may influence or alter his values, beliefs, attitudes toward self and others, or his style of life. The present paper reports the use of the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire in a study of a sample of Chinese college students in two different educational and social environments--specifically, in a study of personality differences between Taiwan and Hong Kong college students. The Taiwan subjects included 159 males and 139 females enrolled at Taiwan Provincial Normal University, while the Hong Kong subjects were 93 males and 165 females attending Chu-hai College, Kowloon. The translated items were again rechecked and modified by the consensus of several Chinese social scientists. Within the female group, eight of the personality differences exceeded the 0.05 level of significance, while five of the male personality comparisons exceeded the 0 .05 level.

The article reports on a study of information management at Investment Centers, which have been established in the United States and are quasi-governmental agencies that promote foreign investment in their own developing countries or domestic business enterprises. The agencies, which offer information and advice to potential investors and investment promoters, also act as liaisons by matching investment opportunities to the prospective investors' needs. The four countries in this study are Israel, Greece, Taiwan, and Ireland. Data ranks the sources of information by order of importance and reliability, including market research firms, overseas financial institutions, and U.S. government agencies. The difficulty in acquiring information is mentioned.

Data collected in a Taiwanese village were used to test predictions derived from Lambert's exchange theory of family structure differences in child training (1971). Thirty-seven women with children between the ages of 4 and 10 were interviewed about their socialization practices, and a number of questions concerning independence training were selected for analysis. As predicted, mothers in extended families were considerably less likely to train their children to be self-reliant, but it was not clear that this difference could be attributed to the grandmother's role as a "low-cost" parental surrogate. Several alternative explanations are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under a government-peasant fertilizer-rice barter system in Taiwan, the use of chemical fertilizer is heavily taxed through a high fertilizer-rice exchange ratio. Important economic gains can be realized if the government lowers the tax on fertilizer input and raises, if necessary, the tax on rice output instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a comparative study of suicide. The objective of this article is to test cross-culturally a number of inter-related variables, in order to account for differences in suicide rates both within and between different societies. Perhaps the most firmly established generalization in the sociological study of suicide concerns its relation with the business cycle. Among many theorists Emile Durkheim was one of the first to propose an explanation of such a relation. With the causal relation between business trends and suicide that Durkheim and many others hypothesized, there should be not only this current-year correlation but also a lag correlation between the two time series. Although suicide is not limited to any particular age, studies have shown that the rate generally rises with advancing age, so that suicide achieves its culminating point only at the final limits of human existence. It seems to be well accepted that the traditional Taiwanese culture has placed great emphasis on stability of the social structure, in which seniority rather then ability is a primary guide to social values.

This study relates fertility behavior to modern economic behavior, namely, saving and consumption of modern durables, for a sample of couples in Taiwan. It uses only couples who say they want no more children, and these couples are further classified by current use of contraception and by whether or not they already had excess fertility. Couples who are successful fertility planners, i.e., those who have no unwanted children and are current users of contraception, are distinctive with regard to modem economic behavior as compared to couples who do not use contraception or have excess fertility. Successful planners are more likely to save and to have more modern durables; these differentials remain when adjustments are made for the effects of family income, wife's age, wife's education, and duration of marriage. It seems that the kind of planning behavior which enables a couple to successfully plan their family size also enables them to manage their economic affairs so that they can save and enjoy more modem consumption goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimates of fecundability (monthly probability of conception) in the absence of contraception are derived from the frequency distribution of conceptive delays immediately following marriage, reported by 2,443 married women aged 20 to 39 included in the Taichung (Taiwan) Intensive Fertility Survey of 1962. Average fecundability of women is positively associated with their socio-economic status. These differentials are not accounted for by differences among socio-economic groups with respect to memory and truncation biases (associated with the marriage duration), wife's age at marriage, or unreported premarital conceptions. A Multiple Classification Analysis suggests that among the socio-economic characteristics, husband's education, rural background, and modern family type are the more important predictors of fecundability. The importance of genetic factors as opposed to cultural factors in producing these socio-economic differences in fecundability can not be evaluated systematically. Moreover, the relation of a couple's privacy, their attitude toward family building, and patterns of mate selection to their socio- economic status would have to be taken into account before the differences in fecundability could be attributed to factors such as nutrition, health, or infections which might directly influence their physiological ability to conceive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study, which tried to measure the effect of small group meetings on changes in attitudes to, knowledge about, and practice of family planning in Taiwan. More specifically, it tried to assess: the effectiveness of such meetings in motivating people to accept the loops, the efficiency of holding meetings in every other neighborhood instead of in every neighborhood, thus utilizing the power of diffusion. Before holding small group meetings, a 10 per cent random sample of 794 of all the married women was drawn. Trained public health nurses interviewed them in August 1964 to assess attitudes to, knowledge about and practice of family planning. During the pre-meeting survey, the workers were instructed strictly not to teach people anything about family planning. If any one asked specific questions, the workers were instructed to invite them to attend meetings for information. Those not attending the meetings also changed in these respects as a result of diffusion or influence from the attendees, although the change was less in these cases of indirect influence.

The article presents a case of Taiwan on the research challenge to social scientists in developing family planning programs. It illustrates in a specific, simple but important experiment the potential for such studies as part of the family planning program. This particular study had immediate operational purposes, but it also tested some ideas about diffusion and about influences that might move a local population from concern and interest to action. Many social scientists could think of a large variety of additional hypotheses that might be tested rather simply as part of just such an experiment. Participation in such studies provides the opportunity to serve science and social policy simultaneously in an area in which conflict about policy goals is usually minimal. In Taiwan, there is present both the considerable progress in social and economic development and the low mortality that are probably favorable conditions for successful family planning programs. On the basis of these developments one would expect that fertility might begin to decline and that the environment might be favorable for introduction of a family planning program.

Discusses the classification of households by economic level with relevance to the utilization of health services in Taiwan. Other economic factors related to the utilization of health services; Total household expenditure; Base expenditure plus differential increment per individual by age.

The author of this article describes his impressions of science teaching in Burma, Taiwan, and Afghanistan. After an examination, which was given to both high school students and to a college chemistry class at the State Training College for Teachers in Rangoon, Burma, the author has found that the former greatly outperformed the latter. In Taiwan, the traditionalism of the teaching was discovered. In Afghanistan, strong proponents of European-type curriculum was found among science teachers. Some common features of science instruction in the three countries include: memoriter learning; the use of the lecture method; science equipment; formalism in teaching; the content of science courses; language; centralization; teachers' salaries; and improvements.

Explains the production function used in estimating agricultural development in Taiwan from 1910 to 1942. Presentation of the Cobb-Douglas function; Comparison of approaches used.

Comments on an article about the productivity change in the agriculture of Taiwan during the colonial period. Errors in estimates of productivity change; Production function used in estimating productivity change.

The article the discusses crisis control, foreign policy and the opposition's behavior toward administration during the Quemoy crisis in Taiwan in 1958. Information on Quemoy's framework of action is presented. The administration and the opposition were in conflict with each other on what was going on in the Taiwan Straits because of policy differences. The major criticisms of the administration's action in the 1958 crisis focus on two issues. First, the administration has acquired undue power in deciding the question of war and peace. Second, the closely related conviction of the opposition that major risks of war were being run in the wrong place, the wrong time and the wrong issue. The trajectory of the administration's crisis behavior is explained.

In Taiwan, conditions appear to be usually favorable for a fertility decline, if low mortality and considerable social development are facilitating conditions. Mortality has been low in Taiwan for some time, and development, as indicated by literacy, circulation of the mass media, nonagricultural employment, growth of gross national product, etc., is considerably above the average of low-fertility countries, as of September 1, 1964. About two years ago, the Michigan Population Center began to work with the Provincial Health Department of Taiwan on studies of the population situation and of family planning efforts. The first task was to examine facts about birth rates available in rather good official records. These confirmed the probability of a favorable situation for fertility decline in at least two ways. First, the birth rate had already been declining slowly all over the island since 1957. Second, the age pattern of the decline was especially significant. Birth rates had not declined for women under thirty, but only for those over thirty, and the decline increased rapidly with age. This is exactly what happened in the West at a similar stage of development.

The family planning research in Taiwan is one of the largest social science experiments ever carried out under controlled conditions, as of September 1, 1964. The author has no reason to doubt this claim; rather, the author like to recall to your minds one of the lessons from what was one of the first social science experiments ever carried out under controlled conditions. The expectation in the Taiwan research was that diffusion would take place, and the deliberate planning for its occurrence is one of the most intriguing aspects of the research design. Diffusion has been made an experimental variable of the first order. The author's own prediction is that the proliferation of social research in the developing countries will have an impact as profound as the introduction of Western technology. The author also recalls another pioneering series of experiments that took place at about the same time in a factory of the Western Electric Co., near Chicago, Illinois. Girls working at assembling various electrical components were observed over a period of years, and their average production rate was recorded.

Water thefts and conflicts are more common in some irrigation systems or in some parts of a single irrigation system, than in others. Water thievery in the Nan-hung canal system in Taiwan is analyzed through an examination of the need to steal, the opportunities to steal, farmer awareness of opportunities to steal, and farmer willingness to steal. Water supply, water rights customs, water control methods, the location of houses, and the size of the system influence the number and distribution of thefts and conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]