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ABSTRACT
This study focused on the effects of the neighbourhood on the fertility outcomes among marriage immigrant wives in Taiwan. In particular, we investigated the effects of the proportion of marriage immigrants in the neighbourhood and ethnic composition of the neighbours on fertility behaviours of foreign wives. The study further explored whether and to what extent commercialised cross-border marriages moderate the relationships. Micro-data from the 2013 Living Demand of Foreign and Mainland Spouses and administrative data for 21 cities and counties were utilised in this study. We found that immigrant wives in an area with a higher proportion of marriage immigrants were likely to have higher fertility and shorter intervals between births. Immigrant wives who married through a broker were likely to have lower fertility if they were living in a neighbourhood with a higher proportion of marriage immigrants. The proportion of immigrants from Mainland China in the neighbourhood was negatively associated with fertility among immigrant wives from Mainland China.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Cross-border marriage is also defined as international marriage or transnational marriage, which is a marriage between two people from different countries or cultures. Considering the fact that most Taiwanese marry Chinese spouses from the Mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau, the expression cross-border marriage rather than international marriage or transnational marriage is adopted in this paper.
2 Socioeconomic characteristics of Taiwanese wives driven from the 2012 Taiwan Social Change Survey are compared with those of marriage immigrant wives in a general manner for reference. Immigrant wives tend to have disadvantageous status; immigrant wives and their husbands have lower levels of educational attainment and income status compared to native Taiwanese counterparts. Immigrant wives are more likely to live in rural areas than Taiwanese wives. In terms of household income, around 63.0% of native Taiwanese couples tend to earn more than 60,000 NTD per month while only 20.8% of immigrant couples are likely to earn 60,000 NTD per month or more (Chang, Citation2016).
3 The authors have decided not to present the regression results about the same ethnicity effects on the birth intervals among Mainland Chinese wives. The main reasons can be stated as follows. First, the current dataset lacked information to estimate the birth intervals between marriage and the first childbirth. The data only enabled us to examine the intervals between the first and the second births and thus, Mainland Chinese wives who had less than two children could not be included in the analysis. This led to a large reduction in the number of Mainland Chinese wives from 7,527 to 1,711 for the regression analysis on the birth intervals. Secondly, the reduced sample available for the analysis revealed a substantially different pattern of distributions from the entire sample in terms of the proportions of wife’s remarriage and husband’s remarriage as well as other socio-demographic variables, which could bias the result to some degree. Most importantly, analyses of condition indexes and variance proportions for the robustness test indicated that serious collinearity between the proportion of marriage immigrants (var. proportion=0.90) and the proportion of marriage immigrants from Mainland (var. proportion=0.69) would harm the validity and reliability of the regression model. Pearson’s correlation coefficient between these two variables was estimated at as high as 0.801 among Mainland Chinese wives. Furthermore, the standardised residuals larger than 3.0 were found for 62 cases in the sample, which may weaken the validity of the models.