Economical Analysis on the World Wide War on Baby Girls “The World Wide War on Baby Girls” is an insightful and well researched article that focuses on gender disparities. In this summary we will be discussing and reviewing the major of arguments in the article, focusing on the economic intuition and outcomes related to the facts that millions of girls are disappearing from some countries as reported. In the natural birth decade, the ratio of baby boys and baby girls maintains a natural balance.
In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. However, sexual disparities tend to rise with not only income and education, but also a country’s draconian population controls. In China, the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls, which is biologically impossible without human intervention. According to the author, there are two main reasons why sexual disparity is widespread. First of all, the marked cultural preference for sons are significant, although not in all traditional societies.
In some ‘old-fashioned’ societies, where the girl is deemed to Join her husband’s family on marriage and lost to her parents, parents prefer to have male children, to guarantee care in their older years. The sexual disparities also tend to rise with income and education. It seems to be the case, in parts of India, that richer, and well educated families, tend to have smaller families. However, they feel more pressured to bear a son to whom the family name and wealth can be carried on through.
Secondly, the bread of fetal-imaging technology and significant drop of ultrasound scan cost encourage the use of sex selection abortions. Although this type of abortion is lawfully banned, it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection. Therefore, there is no effective regulations to stop this behavior. Having millions of women missing from a population can be disastrous, resulting in a rising population of frustrated single men who are not able to find brides.
Knowing their fiery disposition, we could infer that the consequences of increasing crime rates and violence, which would cause even greater social problems. Another effect of the large single male population in China may be the countries’ large savings rate. With fewer and fewer women in the country, families that are wealthier have greater chance to be picked. In order to gain wealth, families will save money. In order to solve the problem of unbalance societies resulting from sexual disparities, the author gives the following recommendation for developing entries such as China and India.
The first one is to learn from South Korean by reversing its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio. The second one is to reform the policy or modernize the society (by, for example, enhancing the status of women) aiming at bringing the sex ratio back to normal. Changes in global demographics could be even more overwhelming than the changes in global climate, therefore, the issues brought forward by the author are worth every country’s attention.
