Abstract
At the end of 1982, 900 persons lived in Don Daeng. The 235 ever-married women among them had given birth to 865 children. Data on the 865 children indicated that life expectancy had risen by at least 10 years during the past three decades; from 55.7 or 53.2 to 65.7 years. Because marital fertility of the 235 women began to decline only in the past decade, the village population would have had increased substantially had it not been for emigration. Actually, however, the village population increased at the rate of a mere 0.65 percent per annum in last 17 years. Of 641 living children of 176 householders in 1981, 190 left the village. About two-thirds of them were married. Of the married emigrants, about 60 percent were engaged in farming, half of them in neighboring villages and half in frontier provinces. Of the remaining married emigrants, and also the unmarried ones, most are engaged in urban areas, of which local towns in the Northeast region are as significant as the Bangkok metropolitan area.
