2012 Volume 64 Issue 4 Pages 350-365
This paper aims to present evidence showing that internal migration affects fertility decline which is called the Second Demographic Transition.
In Japan, the trend of fertility decline has become obvious since around 1990. This trend is mainly caused by the late-marriage tendency of women born in and after the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, more women of these generations migrate into the Tokyo metropolitan area and tend to remain living there. This change in the migration pattern contributed to the expansion of net-migration to the Tokyo metropolitan area since the later half of the 1990s. Women born in the 1960s and 1970s play a major role in these two phenomena, and an idea is hypothesized that there is some sort of relationship between fertility decline and the expansion of the net-migration to the Tokyo metropolitan area since the later half of the 1990s. To approach this relationship, this paper tries to investigate whether marriage behavior in the Tokyo metropolitan area is different from the places where the women come from. Therefore the proportion of unmarried women who migrated into the Tokyo metropolitan area before getting married and that of the women who come from Tokyo there were compared.
The results show that the difference of the proportion of unmarried women (that of the women who migrated into the Tokyo metropolitan area before getting married minus that of the women who come from there) has expanded greatly in the 30-34 and 35-39 year-old age cohorts in the women born in and after the years 1966-1970. This result means that in the newer generation, the women who migrated into the Tokyo metropolitan area before getting married have a stronger tendency to late marriage than the women who come from there. However, the tendency to late marriage of the women who migrated into the Tokyo metropolitan area before getting married has only a slight influence on the proportion of unmarried women in the Tokyo metropolitan area and in Japan.
