China's male/female ratio and its effect on trade(economist.com)
economist.com
China's male/female ratio and its effect on trade
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/03/trade
12 comments
As someone who lives in China, I can vouch for some of the ideas expressed here. They have a phrase that basically says you need a car and a house before you're considered eligible for marriage. For a number of reasons, however, many of the things described in this article can't last forever: younger people (known here as "jiu ling hou" or post-90s generation) typically are far less concerned about saving money, and love to spend. The one child policy has been relaxed too - if you were both single children born after the 80s, from an ethnic minority, live in one or two of the biggest cities or live in the countryside and your first child was a girl you can have a second child. Also a little-reported and not officially recognised fact is that the statistics are not as bad as they seem. In China, you must register your child (for a "hu kou") in order for them to get an education etc. In the countryside many families will choose to only register their first son so as not to incur fines. This means that there are likely millions of women and girls out there not recognised by the state.
So there's millions of Chinese women and girls out there who've never received an education, and this is a country that is trying to build a middle class...
Wouldn't they eventually show up in a census?
Yeah they actually did a census last year that was supposed to be the first to include these "unofficials". But yes, this does mean that lots of women have never received an education. The rich/poor divide here has to be seen to be believed.
If sex ratios are as important as Mr Wei’s argues, the only way the Chinese can restore global financial order is to either import women from other countries, export men, or promote polyandry.
… or start a very bloody war with someone.
… or start a very bloody war with someone.
I'm not sure exporting men or importing women is feasible considering that China's only comparably populous neighbor, India, suffers from the same male/female imbalance.
I don't see why that should make it unfeasible; China is still the wealthier country of the two, after all.
Yeah, but what kind of unfilial Chinese son and unfilial Indian daughter would disgrace their own families like that? It seems unlikely to happen en masse.
Perhaps a subsidy if your `only` child is a female. Like a baby bonus but for girls only.
There's no way out of the gender imbalance. Even if it was fixed somehow, there'd be a glut of women a generation younger than the recently created glut of men.
Yeah, younger women never marry older men.
Much like how women never marry multiple men.
The complex incentives mechanisms of child birth and relationships have already been distorted by the Chinese government, and I don't think that the solution to this problem is to distort them further.
It may be helpful to subsidize female births, but an obvious complication is the fact that these females will be much younger than their male counterparts. Not a big deal on an individual level, as females do sometimes marry men ten or twenty years their senior, but at a national level?
That's just one easily identified complication of subsidizing female births. How verifiable could this be? What about enforcement? How do you make sure that baby girls don't die of "natural causes" once their parents pocket the baby bonus? Who knows? I don't. You don't. The Chinese government doesn't. Shit's complicated.
The complex incentives mechanisms of child birth and relationships have already been distorted by the Chinese government, and I don't think that the solution to this problem is to distort them further.
It may be helpful to subsidize female births, but an obvious complication is the fact that these females will be much younger than their male counterparts. Not a big deal on an individual level, as females do sometimes marry men ten or twenty years their senior, but at a national level?
That's just one easily identified complication of subsidizing female births. How verifiable could this be? What about enforcement? How do you make sure that baby girls don't die of "natural causes" once their parents pocket the baby bonus? Who knows? I don't. You don't. The Chinese government doesn't. Shit's complicated.