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Abstract
This study analyses nuptiality patterns in three Central Asian countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan—over two decades preceding and one decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, using census and Demographic Health Survey data. Although marriage remained universal through the end of that period, marriage age increased, and for younger cohorts, marriage rates declined considerably. Marriage age began to increase in the years following independence and there are no signs of any reversal. Within these countries marriage rates showed significant variation by educational achievement, and a much smaller variation by rural–urban residence. In Kazakhstan, ethnic differences in marriage age—Russians marrying earlier than the native Kazakhs—began to narrow. During the years of social, political and economic turmoil that preceded and followed independence, marriage rates increased dramatically followed by a steep decline in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan but not in Kazakhstan. Explanations of these trends are proposed based on the literature on demographic adjustments to social crises and the specifics of Central Asia's historico-cultural and socio-economic contexts.
Acknowledgements
This study was partially supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (USA) grant R03 HD044020.
Notes
1. Comparable data from Turkmenistan and Tajikistan are not available.
2. Currently living with a man/(currently living with a man + currently married); currently refers to the year the survey was conducted.
3. In most former Soviet Republics, the official minimum marriage age was 18 for both women and men, but in exceptional circumstances, earlier marriages were also allowed. The marriage laws remained largely unchanged in Central Asia in the period covered in this study.
4. There has been no national population census in Uzbekistan since the USSR census of 1989. It is possible to calculate marriage rates from the 2002 Uzbekistan DHS data. However, given the oddities of the survey procedure, it would be inappropriate to compare age-specific marriage rates obtained from the survey data in 2002 with the 1989 rates obtained from the census data. Therefore, they are not presented in Table 1.
5. SMAM was proposed by Hajnal (Citation1953), and could be interpreted as average number of years lived in the single state by those who marry prior to a certain age. In the present analyses, this age is assumed to be 50.
6. Regression estimates for this and other models in the paper are available from the first author upon request.
7. Two pieces of information about residence are available from the DHS: residence at age of 12 (childhood residence) and residence at the time of survey (current residence). Since we are interested in the influence of residence at the time of marriage current residence could be misleading, as married women could have moved after marriage, as is typically the case. As the risk of changing residence between age 12 and 16 (when the risk of marriage begins in our models) is quite negligible, we have used childhood residence as the indicator for residence.
8. It should be noted that education was measured at the time of the survey and not at the time of marriage. Though it is not widespread, a sizeable percentage of women continue their education after marriage. For instance, in Kazakhstan about 10 per cent of women were still in school four years after their marriage (calculated from Kazakhstan DHS 1999).
9. In this paper, we have not considered the influence of Russian emigration on marriage rates. If emigrating Russians and other people of European origin were predominately unmarried, their emigration would lead to a decline in overall marriage rates. Unfortunately, data on marital status of emigrants from Central Asian republics are not readily available, and we, therefore, cannot ascertain whether unmarried individuals indeed have been more likely to leave. However, there is some evidence to suggest the opposite—that Russian and other Europeans have been more likely to migrate as a family unit after marriage. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, Agadjanian et al. (forthcoming Citation2008b) find that for Europeans, migration intentions were more pronounced among those in marital unions, net of other factors.