In the higher income economies of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan changes in the household are occurring rapidly for a number of reasons. Among the more prominent are increasingly obvious differentials in choices made by women and men to seek further education, develop careers and live more independently, which lead to late or no marriage, rising divorce rates and fertility rates falling below replacement. The social consequences of the apparent dissolution of the household are already being felt. Within households they include the absence of home caretakers for children and the elderly, and high shares of populations now living alone without support. All of these factors have broader societal impacts: shrinking labor force and chronic labor scarcities; rapidly aging populations; rising ratios of non-working to working populations and related welfare crises. How economies can remain robust in situations of rising wages due to growing labor scarcities, and falling numbers of consumers due to population ‘implosions’, becomes a crucial question for every society experiencing these trends.

Global migration and household transactions have begun to counter some of these trajectories. International marriages are rapidly increasing in their share of total marriages. Importation of foreign workers is now at hundreds of thousands and can be expected to climb to millions. These include domestic helpers and health care workers needed to care for children, the elderly, and entire households. Although adoption from abroad is still not socially welcomed, surrogate parenting using foreign women has emerged as a social issue. Children are being sent abroad to North America, Europe and Australia for education and are often accompanied by their mothers as working fathers stay in the home contry and send support money to them. The movement of retired couples from higher to lower income countries as a strategy to stretch fixed incomes is also emergent. All of these trends appear to be expanding rapidly, as exemplified by statistics showing that in Taiwan about one-third of all new marriages have a foreign spouse. For rural Korea the share is more than one-quarter.

Two broad questions emanate from these observations. One concerns attempts to re-assert traditional roles of the household and/or find new social institutions to replace it within society. These includes attempts by governments to create incentives to raise drastically falling birth rates as well as efforts to create alternatives such as assisted living arrangements for the elderly. The second question concerns how well global householding efforts are doing and whether they actually contribute to reversing or shoring up householding in any significant way. It includes questions about immigration controls and their impacts on households. Citizenship, rights to social services, access to housing, and human trafficking disguised as marriage or severe exploitation of domestic helpers are also among the issues confronting global householding. Governance of migration and migrant household welfare in both migrant sending and receiving countries is thus a dimension that cuts across all global householding considerations.