No doubt your informant has informed, but in Australia there are financial incentives not to get married – married individuals are taxed separately, and there are social service payments for single parents. So basically, married couples are subsidizing single parents and unmarried couples who fake single-parenthood through their tax payments.
Hong Kong is the reverse – married couples are taxed jointly. So if you have a lower earning spouse (wonderful old fashioned word that has disappeared in officialese in Oz, to be replaced by ‘partner’, or even ‘current partner’), it can push you down into a lower tax bracket while not necessarily elevating your spouse into a higher one. Plus there is a tax allowance if you have a spouse. So there is some financial incentive to get married and stay that way. I think this is just the system mirroring what has happened in society, but it tends in the direction of self-reinforcement.
That plus other radically different financial structuring seems certain to lead to significant (there’s that word again) societal differences, even discounting all of the other relevant factors. And I’m certainly not discounting heritability/environmental/cultural factors – the casual observation that kids from broken homes have trouble establishing stable relationships seems to hold, from what I see, if anecdote has any value at all.
