Being realistic about age at marriage and fertility decline in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The paper examines the validity of utilizing an indirect measure such as the Singulate Mean Age at Marriage(SMAM)to estimate the central age at marriage in Sri Lanka where the proportions never married have expanded substantially during the past two decades.By tracing the age at marriage of 20 successive birth cohorts from the sample of women in the World Fertility Survey of Sri Lanka itself,it demonstrates that the female SMAM of 25.1 years as claimed in the sameReport is unacceptably high and that the median age at marriage of the cohorts are well within 20 years of age.It is submitted that cohort data provide a more robust measure for estimating prevalent trends than SMAM.The recent fertility decline observed in the country,it is surmised,is due primarily to the increasing numbers who 'postpone'marriage rather than to a dramatic increase in the age at marriage.The latter has been quite moderate at best.Speculating that these 'postponements'are engineered mainly through economic constraints rather than due to a substantive normative charge in society,the paper expects to observe a 'marriage boom'and a 'baby boom'at the first signs of a sustained recovery in the economic realm.