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Since 1949 Taiwan and China have been governed by different political regimes. Nevertheless, research shows that women in both societies now enjoy significantly higher social status and have lower fertility rates. No systematic empirical research has compared the two. This book is designed to investigate the effects of women´s status on fertility and sterilization behaviors in these two areas by means of multi-level analysis focusing on women´s education levels and employment status as predictors at both the individual and aggregate levels. To examine the influence of enforced policy, in China´s models, variables were added about whether the participants had a government-issued one-child certificate or had complied with the childbirth quota set by local authorities. Most results are consistent with our hypotheses.The findings of this book, particularly the micro-macro linkages, contribute to an explanation of how higher women´s status and lower fertility rates across the two regimes emerged from both common and disparate processes. How multi-level investigations of fertility and women´s status could be implemented in other parts of the world is covered.

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Jin-kai Godfrey Li obtained bachelor and master degrees majoring in Sociology in Taiwan; the topics of Social Demography and Gender issues are the subjects for Ph. D. in Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas USA. The relationship between women´s status and fertility behavior, especially in Taiwan and China, is his research interests.

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