Marriage: International Comparison (1)

I have decided to restart posting to this blog from this week. Please welcome me back.

Since I am a big fan of the famous Freakonomics Radio podcast, and the latest program was all about marriage, I thought that it might be a good idea to review some of the international marriage statistics to compare cross national differences. Figure 1 is a summary from a technical paper that was published by the United Nations. The 2010 figures are estimates, while later ones are projections. Y-axis represents the percentage of the married or in-union woman in the age of 15-49 against all woman, meaning that for example if you bump into a female randomly walking on a street in Japan, you have a 50% chance that this person is married and is in between 15 and 40. Only by this figure, you would be able to see some general trends. First is that the number of married women will decline. The steepness of the lines vary by country, but the general trend is south bound. Second is that the numbers vary quite a lot. About 10 point difference over the twenty-year time frame between France and Japan may end up in different consequences, not only in population dynamics, but some other social differences.

Stimulated by seeing this, I further looked into some data that the UN publishes. The World Marriage Data 2012 is an excel format international comparison data that is publicly available and well organized to at least cover some of my naive curiosity. And here not surprisingly, I have found some interesting data about marriage, even just by comparing US and Japan. Figures 2 and 3 are plotting the percentage of the people in each age groups who have NOT experienced marriage in their entire life time. These are the latest available data for both men and woman.

The first observation from these figures is that in both countries, women are more likely to have experienced marriage at any age group. If we exclude some minor cases like international marriage or same sex marriage, this suggests two possibilities. One is that husbands' ages are likely to be larger than their wives', and divorced men are more likely to get remarried than divorced women, because marriage is a one by one matching situation and the less marriage experience in men suggests that wedding is relatively concentrated in men and dispersed in women.
But if you simply focus on the difference of the two countries, more insights reveal. For example, more than a third of Japanese men remain unmarried in their late 30's, while less than a forth of US men are "marriage virgin." This is also the case in women. Does this mean that Japanese men are less attractive to be considered as husbands than US men in general?
More striking is the gap of marriage experience between sexes in the Generation X, which is approximately 35-54 in this diagram, which in Japan this generation is representative as "Dan-kai Juniors." In this age group, the differences in marriage experience rate in both sexes in US is about 5% average, while in Japan it is almost always over 10%.
Why is it the case? The possible hypotheses are,
1) Women marry more aged men in Japan than in US.
2) The ratio of marriage vs divorce is more towards divorce in Japan than in US and Japanese men tend to remarry.
3) The above effects will be more skewed when the population distribution in each age groups are different.
You are all more than welcome to leave a comment for a new idea to explain this difference.