A recent study challenges the assumption that the large deficit of girls in East and South Asia reflects the preference for sons, suggesting that much of the deficit--as much as 75 percent in China--is attributable to hepatitis B (HBV). The claim is inconsistent with the results of a study based on a large medical data set from Taiwan (China), which indicates that HBV infection raises a woman's probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent. In addition, demographic data from China show that the only group of women who have elevated probabilities of bearing sons are those who have already borne daughters. This pattern makes it difficult to see how any biological factor can explain a large part of the imbalance in China's sex ratios at birth, unless it can be shown that it somehow selectively affects those who have borne girls or causes them to first bear girls and then boys. The Taiwanese example suggests that this is not the case with HBV, the impact of which is unaffected by the sex composition of previous births. The data thus support the cultural rather than the biological explanation for gender imbalance. Copyright The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / the world bank. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Contact details of provider: Postal: Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK Fax: 01865 267 985 Email: Web page: http://wbro.oxfordjournals.org/
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.