Impact of International Marriage Migration: Evidence from Taiwan

Elaine Liu, University of Houston
Jin-Tan Liu, National Taiwan University and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Between 1989-2008, there have been more than 399,000 foreign marriages registered in Taiwan. This form of cross border marriages has also gained popularity in other parts of Asia. Most of these marriages consist of arrangements made through a commercial marriage broker between a bride from one of the less developed countries and a groom from a more developed country. This study, based on datasets from Taiwan, is one of the first to examine the impact of international marriage migration on local women using a micro-level dataset. Our goal for the paper is to set up a model to predict how the competition of foreign brides could affect local women's welfare. Then we provide the empirical analysis of the impact of foreign bride on the divorce rate of local women.