Kinship institutions and sex ratios in India

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between kinship institutions and sex ratios inver since Sen (1990) proclaimed that more than 100 million women are missing around the world, referring to the abysmally low fraction of women in the total population, the case of "missing women" has generated considerable interest. In contrast to Europe and North America, where the male-to-female sex ratio is 0.95 (favoring the presence of females), the ratio in many Asian countries -such as India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea-is as high as 1.06, signifi cantly favoring the presence of males. 1 Moreover, in many of these countries, the male-to-female sex ratio seems to have risen over the second half of the twentieth century with economic development, declining family size, and the advent of technologies that facilitate self-selective abortion or sexselection (Park and Cho 1995).In India, and possibly elsewhere in Asia, however, the case of missing women has deep historical roots (Dyson and Moore 1983). Although identifying when the problem of missing women fi rst arose in India is diffi cult, British offi cials were well aware of the problem in North India during the mid-nineteenth century. 2 More reliable evidence from the British India censuses conducted during the late nineteenth century shows that this problem was clearly a northern rather than a southern or an eastern problem. The male-to-female sex ratio was highest in northern regions, such as Punjab; relatively equal in eastern regions, such as Bengal; but relatively low and favored women in southern regions, such as colonial Madras (Dyson and Moore 1983;Visaria 1961). 3 Although the regional difference in sex ratios narrowed between the northern and southern regions during the twentieth century, the narrowing is largely due to the convergence of southern sex ratios toward the northern fi gures. For all of India, the overall sex ratio increased from 1.03 to 1.07 between 1901 and 2001. During this period, however, the sex ratio in the historically most-masculine Punjab region in the North, ranging from *Tanika Chakraborty, DIW-Berlin, Mohrenstrasse 58, Berlin 10117; e-mail: tchakraborty@diw.de. Sukkoo Kim, Washington University and National Bureau of Economic Research. We gratefully acknowledge Bob Pollak and three anonymous referees for providing us with extremely valuable comments. We thank Karen Norberg, David Rudner, and seminar participants at the Work, Family and Public Policy workshop at Washington University and also at the 2008 annual meeting of the Population Association of America for helpful comments and discussions. We also thank Lauren Matsunaga and Michael Scarpati for research assistance and Cassie Adcock and the staff of the South Asia Library at the University of Chicago for their generous assistance in data collection. We are also grateful to the Weidenbaum Center and Washington University (Faculty Research Grant) for research support and to CRES at Olin School of Business for their generous conference funding. All errors are ours.1. B...

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