![]() Asccording to the author and his co-authors “accidental injuries and workplace deaths are significantly higher in areas with a more severe shortage of young women relative to men. A shortage of potential brides causes many parents with sons of marriageable age to work more and seek higher-paying but potentially dangerous jobs in sectors such as mining and construction, or jobs exposing them to hazardous materials and extreme heat or cold.” This emboldens employers to “invest less in workplace safety, since there are enough people “more willing" to risk their health and accept" such jobs. In the Journal of Development Economics, the author et al say China’s “unbalanced male-female ratio also contributes to unsafe workplace practices, leading to many preventable injuries and deaths. ![]() The sex imbalance thus likely underpins an important source of tension between China and the US.” As savings rate increases, it also “tends to boost a country’s trade surplus.” Maybe! Yet in the US, economists do not believe that trade deficits matter, dismissing the assumption that Americans’ failure to save money is the cause of their trade deficits. In a 2011 paper, the author and Xiaobo Zhang “found that the rise in the male-female ratio in China’s pre-marital-age cohort from 1990 to 2007 accounted for about half of the increase in the household savings rate during that period. Young men – and especially parents with unmarried sons – increase their savings rates substantially in order to enhance their relative competitiveness in the dating and marriage markets.” Wedding customs demand the groom to give his future in-laws a big betrothal gift, traditionally known as the bride price. The author points out how the skewed “male-female ratio may have contributed to between one-third and one-half of the increase in its trade surplus with other countries. On the other hand, it drives up savings rates and drives down consumption. As the working age population plummets, it also shrinks the labour pool and hurts the economy. The gender imbalance creates problems - ranging from economic inefficiency to instability as more men can not find a girlfriend or wive, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behaviour - all of which makes it harder for China to sustain its impressive growth. ![]() The gender ratio of the total population ranged at approximately 105 males to 100 females in 2020, with millions of men being unable to marry and build a family. As a result of its deep-rooted cultural preferences for boys, and its decades old one-child policy, China is going through a gender crisis, in which men outnumber women. Shang-Jin Wie highlights all the negative impact gender imbalance has on China and its relations with the US. Because boys and young men have a slightly higher mortality rate, and because husbands tend to be somewhat older than wives, such a ratio at birth is nature’s way of ensuring a roughly 1:1 ratio by the time they reach reproductive age. ![]() The sex ratio at birth is normally around 106 boys per 100 girls. Chinese women live about three years longer than Chinese men on average, so the “excess males” are entirely the result of an unusually high ratio of boys to girls at birth. China, by contrast, has 105 males for every 100 females, according to the latest census. In the United States, for example, there were 96 males per 100 females in 2020. This numerical imbalance from birth onward has several significant economic implications – and not only for China.īecause women live longer than men on average, most countries’ populations have more females than males. NEW YORK – China’s recently released population census confirms the persistence of the country’s alarming excess of males relative to the global norm. ![]()
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