Agenda 13 of ICPD elaborates over 8 pages, actions to be taken by each state under three headings: A) national actions and policies B) program management and human resource development, and C) financial procurement and distribution. I would like to point to the important population policy viewpoints that should be basically examined under this agenda of national actions and policies.

The demographic transition theory, which had been the main explanation to population changes, has gone through remarkable historical changes because fertility transition, the major element of the population theory, a process largely completed prior to World War II, was broadly explained by economic and social factors. However, such an understanding has been found to be ineffective because social scientists have found it difficult to explain the fertility decline in developing countries that started a rapid decline in fertility in the second half of the 20th century.

In the process of studies on the factors of fertility decline in many societies, it has been found that economic factors are not always dominant in population changes but social, economic and political factors are intertwined. Furthermore, it has been pointed out that cultural factors act as underlying elements. The above fact indicates the need to confine the traditional demographic transition theory within the western cultural sphere, and to develop new theories so that they can be applied to population transition phenomena occurring in different cultural spheres.

The state's intervention and assistance policies have been widely implemented not only in promoting fertility decline but also in vital statistical phenomena, and the action of the state has come to hold very important significance.

As the state's inference and policies on population phenomena affect a very wide range of fields, careful analyses and studies are required. It should be kept in mind that they are markedly different from the past population policies in the range of impact they make.

For the contents of individual policies, experts of respective fields must be mobilized for analyses and evaluation of policy implementation. Governments need to assign highly specialized expert groups on a permanent basis. For multi-faceted population policies, better policy-making processes are desired through international comparative studies, along with a new idea of population change that has never been worked out in the past.