Missing Women in China and India over Seven Decades: An Analysis of Birth and Mortality Data from 1950 to 2020

Abstract

This paper constructs long-run estimates of total missing women (including missing girls at birth and excess female deaths) in China and India over seven decades from 1950 to 2020. We find that the number of missing women in India has been higher than in China throughout the seven decades. Over time, missing girls at birth grew faster in China than in India, but China has made more rapid progress in reducing excess female deaths after birth. While the share of missing girls at birth in total missing women has risen since the 1980s, there has also been a shift in excess female mortality from younger to older age groups. Our estimated trends are consistent with key economic, social, demographic and technological events and developments in the two countries.

Keywords:

• Missing women
• sex ratio
• gender discrimination
• China
• India

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J11
• J13
• J16
• N35

Acknowledgements

We thank the Journal reviewers for comments that helped improve the paper. The authors did not receive funding from any organization for the work undertaken for this paper, and they have no conflicts of interest. The data used are in public domain, and the code is available from the authors upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Northern America consists of Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, United States of America.

2 The distinction between flow and stock estimates of missing women is discussed below in Section 2, where we also discuss the role of time-varying counterfactuals in constructing estimates of missing women.

3 WPP 2019 Revision contains a full time series of population size by age and sex and the components of population change for 201 countries. For the 2019 Revision, 1690 population censuses conducted between 1950 and 2018, as well as information on births and deaths from vital registration systems for 163 countries and demographic indicators from 2700 surveys were utililzed (United Nations, 2019b).

4 Parts of this database have also been utilized in other studies on missing women, including World Bank (2012) and Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015).

5 Some of the alternatives in Table A1 relate to stock estimates that rely on specifying a counterfactual sex ratio of the population.

6 The results are similar when using the ratio of female to male life expectancy as the dependent variable.

7 See the detailed breakdown provided in the online supplementary material.

8 While Finland and Sweden are included in MDR, they are relatively small countries and hence do not significantly influence the MDR average.

9 Detailed tables on the age composition of missing women for all 22 age groups are provided in the online supplementary material.

10 See also Jiang, Shuzhuo, Feldman, and Sanchez-Barricarte (2012) for similar evidence who report a peak “during the Great Famine in the late 1950s when around 5 percent of women are estimated to have been missing.”

11 See Table S1 in the supplementary material.

12 See Tables S1 and S2 in the supplementary material.

13 See, for instance, Banister (2004), Das Gupta, Chung, and Li (2009), Zhu, Lu, and Hesketh (2009), Ebenstein (2010), Li, Yi, & Zhang (2011) and Bongaarts (2013).