Analyses and Projections of Households and Living Arrangements in Six ASEAN Countries

Project's Details

Title: Analyses and Projections of Households and Living Arrangements in Six ASEAN Countries (HOUSEHOLD-ASEAN)

Funded by: Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2

Amount: S$655,892

PI: Associate Professor Feng Qiushi, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, NUS

Co-PIs: Associate Professor Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan, Department of Sociology and Anthropology and CFPR, NUS; Associate Professor Dommaraju Premchand Varma, School of Social Sciences, NTU; Associate Professor Haoming Liu, Department of Economics and CFPR, NUS; Assistant Professor Joelle Fong Hung Yee, Lee Kuan Yew School

Collaborator(s): Professor Aris Ananta (Indonesia), Professor Evi Nurvidya (Brunei), Professor Grace Cruz (Philippines), Dr. Jeofrey Bautista Abalos (Philippines), Dr. Milad Bagi (Iran), Professor Patama Vapattanawong (Thailand), Professor Parveen Kaur (Malaysia), Dr. Tan Poh Lin (Singapore), Professor Nguyen Duc Vinh (Viet Nam)

International Advisory Board: Professor Zeng Yi (Duke University and Peking University), Dr. Wang Zhenglian (Duke University), Dr. Reiko Hayashi (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS), Japan), and Professor Frans Willekens (University of Groningen), Professor Cao Kai (East China Normal University), Dr. Sabahat Hussain (Pakistan) and Dr. Maqsood Sadiq (Pakistan).

Supported by: Asian Population Association as APA Scientific Groups 

Project duration: 01 Aug 2023 to 31 July 2026

 

Abstract

The world population is changing rapidly, whereas at the same time, households are also under a great transformation worldwide. The future transformation of households and living arrangements is now at the core of the demographic transition theories. According to the second demographic transition (SDT), driven by the value shift featured by individualism and post-materialism, new types of households and living arrangements may prevail in our world such as cohabitation, solo-living, childless household, and single-parent household. Analyzing and forecasting the dynamics of households and living arrangements is also of practical significance. Households act as sources of both the supply of labor and demand for goods and services to firms, and are the basic unit of economic activities such as demands for energy, housing, home-based commodities, care of older adults and children, and many other services, and often become the main target in the decision of public and business planning.

The short-, mid-, and long-term changes in household structure in the context of Singapore and many other nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are not studied sufficiently. Given the theoretical and practical importance, the project of HOUSEHOLDS-ASEAN aims to analyze and project the transformation of households and living arrangements in six major ASEAN nations, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam, from 2020 to 2060. These six countries combined are home to about 600 million people, approximately 90% of the ASEAN's total population.

We set three goals in this project. The theoretical goal is to test the SDT theory in the ASEAN region. As empirical evidence of the SDT model mostly comes from the West, the ongoing debates focus on whether this theory is just a "Western idiosyncrasy"; Asia thus becomes the frontline of research. Exploring how household transformation is unfolding in ASEAN will fill in a major gap of the literature. Methodically, we will develop and apply the DemoRates, which is an R package, capable of estimating the key demographic rates of marriage, birth, migration, and any other transition rates, classified by demographic characteristics such as age, sex, marital status, education, rural/urban residence, and race. And we will test the SDT model through the ProFamy method, an established macro-simulation method, to forecast the numbers, sizes, structures, and types of households and living arrangements. Lastly, with the projections on all types of households and living arrangements for the six ASEAN countries, we aim to estimate future demands of age-friendly housing and home-based energy demands in this region, both of which are of important policy and business values. Because these demands are highly associated with the sizes of households and types of living arrangements of older adults, it is technically feasible to take advantage of the national surveys on housing and home-based energy demands in combination with the ProFamy forecasts to obtain the future demands in housing and energy for a given society.