Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Estimating the Effect of the One-Child Policy on the Sex Ratio Imbalance in China: Identification Based on the Difference-in-Differences

  • Published:
Demography

Abstract

In China, the male-biased sex ratio has increased significantly. Because the one-child policy applies only to the Han Chinese but not to minorities, this unique affirmative policy allows us to identify the causal effect of the one-child policy on the increase in sex ratios by using a difference-in-differences (DD) estimator. Using the 1990 census, we find that the strict enforcement of the one-child policy led to 4.4 extra boys per 100 girls in the 1980s, accounting for about 94% of the total increase in sex ratios during this period. The robust tests indicate that the estimated policy effect is not likely confounded by other omitted policy shocks or socioeconomic changes. Moreover, we conduct the DD estimation using both the 2000 census and the 2005 mini-census. Our estimates suggest that the one-child policy resulted in about 7.0 extra boys per 100 girls for the 1991–2005 birth cohorts. The effect of the one-child policy accounts for about 57% and 54% of the total increases in sex ratios for the 1991–2000 and 2001–2005 birth cohorts, respectively.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The sex ratio is defined as the number of males per 100 females in the reference population.

  2. It has also been suggested that the endogenized sex ratio by the son preference may systematically degenerate girls to be born in low-status families (Edlund 1999).

  3. The interaction between sex preference, fertility, and sex ratio has long been recognized in the literature (Becker 1991; Ben-Porath and Welch 1976).

  4. Second births were strictly forbidden at the early stage of the implementation of the one-child policy after 1979. However, Central Document 7, issued in early 1984 by the Party Central Committee, allows rural couples to have a second child if the first was a girl (Peng 1996).

  5. Two facts greatly substantiate the validity of our quasi-experimental design of the DD estimator. First, there is clear evidence that the sex ratios for minorities and the Han were very close prior to the enactment of the one-child policy but diverged significantly afterward. Second, there is little difference between Han and minorities in changes of family structure, mother’s age at first birth, parental characteristics, and parental labor market behaviors during the post-treatment period. Li and Zhang (2009) constructed a similar DD estimator based on the differential treatment across ethnic groups to test the external effects of fertility behavior. Li and Zhang (2007) also exploited the differential treatments of the one-child policy between the Han and minorities to construct an instrumental variable to identify the effect of (endogenous) population growth on economic growth.

  6. The four modern population censuses used in Coale and Banister (1994) were conducted in 1953, 1964, 1982, and 1990, and the two in-depth fertility surveys were carried out in 1982 and 1988.

  7. This figure is very similar to Coale and Banister’s (1994) Figure 2 except that their cohort analysis was conducted in a five-year moving average form to smooth out irregular disturbances.

  8. Descriptive statistics from various sources show that the ratio of female wages to male wages hovered around 80% throughout the 1980s and 1990s, which is comparable to that in the United States during the same period (Blau and Kahn 1997; Gustafsson and Li 2000; Meng 1998).

  9. Since the dependent variable is a dummy variable, a logit model would seem to be a natural choice. However, a linear probability model facilitates the interpretation of our DD estimates, as shown above. The major results in our article are confirmed when we use a logit model.

  10. Besley and Case (2000) addressed the endogeneity in the implementation of policies in natural experiment studies.

  11. The reason that the birth year is truncated at 1972 is that children born in 1973 were just 17 years old in the census year of 1990. Since 18 is the legal minimum age for full-time work in China, most children younger than 18 are still economically dependent on and living with their parents.

  12. Because the census contains no information about children no longer living at home, excluding those households with children living outside home will result in a biased sample. Following Angrist and Evans (1998), we restrict mother’s age to less than or equal to 38 to mitigate the sample-selection problem. Because the minimum age for marriage as prescribed by the Chinese Marriage Law is 20, the age cutoff is 17 for the eldest children of these women, and most of these children are still living with their parents.

  13. The difference in sex ratios between the Han and minorities in the post–policy change period is given by \( 100 \times {\left[ {0.5234/{\left( {1 - 0.5234} \right)} - 0.5124/{\left( {1 - 0.5124} \right)}} \right]} \), which equals 4.7 (note that 0.5234 and 0.5124 are from the last row of columns 1 and 2 in Table 2).

  14. We conducted the DD estimation on the rural and urban subsamples, respectively, and found that the DD estimates were statistically significant only for the rural subsamples. For a detailed discussion, see Li et al. (2010).

  15. We also analyzed the time pattern of the DD estimates by birth year (Li et al. 2010). We found that the time pattern of our DD estimates is highly consistent with the implementation stages of the one-child policy in the 1980s.

  16. The 1.5-child policy refers to the policy that allows rural families with a first-birth girl to have a second birth.

  17. Guo (2005) and Gu et al. (2008) analyzed fertility rates and sex ratios across different policy regimes. It would be interesting to explore the causal effects of the 1-, 1.5-, and 2-child policies on sex ratios among the Han Chinese. However, these policies among the Han Chinese are suspected to be endogenously imposed. In contrast, the differential treatment of the policy across ethnic groups is evidently exogenously imposed.

References

  • Angrist, J. (2002). How do sex ratios affect marriage and labor markets? Evidence from America’s second generation. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117, 997–1038.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Angrist, J., & Evans, W. (1998). Children and their parent’s labor supply: Evidence from exogenous variation in family size. American Economic Review, 88, 450–477.

    Google Scholar 

  • Angrist, J., & Krueger, A. (1999). Empirical strategies in labor economics. In O. Ashenfelter, & D. Card (Eds.), Handbook of labor economics (Volume 3A, pp. 1277–1366). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Banister, J. (2004). Shortage of girls in China today. Journal of Population Research, 21, 19–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Becker, G. S. (1991). A treatise on the family (enlarged edition). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Behrman, J. R., & Rosenzweig, M. R. (2002). Does increasing women’s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation? American Economic Review, 92, 323–334.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ben-Porath, Y., & Welch, F. (1976). Do sex preferences really matter? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90, 285–307.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Besley, T., & Case, A. (2000). Unnatural experiments? Estimating the incidence of endogenous policies. Economic Journal, 110, 672–694.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blau, F. D., & Kahn, L. M. (1997). Swimming upstream: Trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s. Journal of Labor Economics, 15, 1–42.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cai, F., Park, A., & Zhao, Y. (2008). The Chinese labor market. In L. Brandt & T. Rawski (Eds.), China’s great economic transformation (pp. 167–215). London, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Chiappori, P.-A., Fortin, B., & Lacroix, G. (2002). Marriage market, divorce legislation and household labor supply. Journal of Political Economy, 110, 37–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coale, A. J., & Banister, J. (1994). Five decades of missing females in China. Demography, 31, 459–479.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Das Gupta, M. (2005). Explaining Asia’s “missing women”: A new look at the data. Population and Development Review, 31, 529–535.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dreze, J., & Khera, R. (2000). Crime, gender, and society in India: Insights from homicide data. Population and Development Review, 26, 335–352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Duflo, E. (2003). Grandmothers and granddaughters: Old-age pensions and intrahousehold allocation in South Africa. World Bank Economic Review, 17, 1–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ebenstein, A. Y. (2010). The “missing girls” of China and the unintended consequences of the one child policy. Journal of Human Resources, 45, 87–115.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edlund, L. (1999). Son preference, sex ratios, and marriage patterns. Journal of Political Economy, 107, 1275–1304.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Edlund, L., Li, H., Yi, J., & Zhang, J. (2007). Sex ratios and crime: Evidence from China’s One-Child Policy (IZA Discussion Paper No. 3214). Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor.

  • Foster, A. D., & Rosenzweig, M. R. (1999). Missing women, the marriage market and economic growth (working paper). Providence, RI: Brown University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greenhalgh, S. (2003). Science, modernity, and the making of China’s one-child policy. Population and Development Review, 29, 163–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gu, B., Song, J., Liu, S., Wang, J., & Jiang, L. (2008). The practice and enlightenment of the two-child policy regime (in Chinese). Population Research, 32(4), 33–49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guilmoto, C. Z. (2009). The sex ratio transition in Asia. Population and Development Review, 35, 519–549.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guo, Z. (2005). A demographic analysis according to the one-child policy regimes based on the 2000 population census (in Chinese). In Census Office of the Chinese State Council and National Bureau of Statistics (Ed.), A Report of a National Major Research Project for the 2000 Population Census. Beijing: China Statistics Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gustafsson, B., & Li, S. (2000). Economic transformation in urban China and the gender earnings gap. Journal of Population Economics, 13, 305–330.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hardee-Cleaveland, K., & Banister, J. (1988). Fertility policy and implementation in China, 1986–88. Population and Development Review, 14, 245–286.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hesketh, T., & Xing, Z. W. (2006). Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and consequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 13271–13275.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hudson, V. M., & Boer, A. D. (2002). A surplus of men, a deficit of peace: Security and sex ratios in Asia’s largest states. International Security, 26(4), 5–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, G. (2002). Effects of the one-child policy on the number and sex composition of children in China (working paper). Seattle, WA: University of Washington.

    Google Scholar 

  • Li, H., Yi, J., & Zhang, J. (2010). Estimating the effect of the one-child policy on sex ratio imbalance in China: Identification based on the difference-in-differences (IZA Discussion Paper No. 5149). Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor.

  • Li, H., & Zhang, J. (2007). Do high birth rates hamper economic growth? Review of Economics and Statistics, 89, 110–117.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, H., & Zhang, J. (2008). Fines, limited liability and fertility (working paper). Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

    Google Scholar 

  • Li, H., & Zhang, J. (2009). Testing the external effect of household behavior: The case of the demand for children. Journal of Human Resources, 44, 890–915.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lin, M. J., & Luoh, M. C. (2008). Can hepatitis B mothers account for the number of missing women? Evidence from three million newborns in Taiwan. American Economic Review, 98, 2259–2273.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meng, X. (1998). Male-female wage determination and gender wage discrimination in China’s rural industrial sector. Labour Economics, 5, 67–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meyer, B. D. (1995). Natural and quasi-experiments in economics. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 13, 151–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). (2002). Tabulation on the 2000 population census of the People’s Republic of China (in Chinese). Beijing: China Statistics Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oster, E. (2005). Hepatitis B and the case of the missing women. Journal of Political Economy, 113, 1163–1216.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oster, E., & Chen, G. (2008). Hepatitis B does not explain male-biased sex ratio in China (NBER Working Paper No. 13971). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

  • Park, C. B., & Han, J. Q. (1990). A minority group and China’s one-child policy: The case of the Koreans. Studies in Family Planning, 21, 161–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peng, P. (Ed.). (1996). Family planning encyclopedia of China (in Chinese). Beijing: China Population Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, M. (2007). The effects of sex ratio imbalance in China on marriage and household bargaining (working paper). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, M. (2008). How marriage market conditions in China influence intergenerational transfers (working paper). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

    Google Scholar 

  • Qian, N. (2008). Missing women and the price of tea in China: The effect of sex-specific earnings on sex imbalance. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123, 1251–1285.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rao, V. (1993). The rising price of husbands: A hedonic analysis of dowry increases in rural India. Journal of Political Economy, 101, 666–677.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosenzweig, M. R., & Schultz, T. P. (1982). Market opportunities, genetic endowments, and intrafamily resource distribution: Child survival in rural India. American Economic Review, 72, 803–815.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rozelle, S., Dong, X., Zhang, L., & Mason, A. (2002). Gender wage gaps in post-reform rural China. Pacific Economic Review, 7, 157–179.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scharping, T. (2003). Birth control in China, 1949–2000: Population policy and demographic development. London, UK: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sen, A. (1990). More than 100 million women are missing. New York Review of Books, 37(20).

  • Short, S. E., & Zhai, F. (1998). Looking locally at China’s one-child policy. Studies in Family Planning, 29, 373–374.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, D. (1994). Like father, like son; like mother, like daughter: Parental resources and child height. Journal of Human Resources, 29, 950–988.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tuljapurkar, S., Li, N., & Feldman, M. W. (1995). High sex ratios in China’s future. Science, 267, 874–876.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wei, S., & Zhang, X. (2008). Sex ratio imbalances stimulate savings rates: Evidence from the missing women in China (working paper). New York: Columbia University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zeng, Y. (2007). Options for fertility policy transition in China. Population and Development Review, 33, 215–246.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeng, Y. (2009). Soft-landing of the two-child plus spacing policy is helpful to resolve the problems of high sex ratio at birth in China (in Chinese). Social Science, 8, 54–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zeng, Y., Ping, T., Baochang, G., Yi, X., Bohua, L., & Yongping, L. (1993). Causes and implications of the recent increase in the reported sex ratio at birth in China. Population and Development Review, 19, 283–302.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, J., Han, J., Liu, P., & Zhao, Y. (2008). Trends in the gender earnings differential in urban China, 1988–2004. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 61, 224–243.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The work described in this article was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CUHK 454608). We thank the editors and two anonymous referees for valuable comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Hongbin Li

  2. Department of Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, New Territories, Hong Kong

    Junjian Yi & Junsen Zhang

Authors
  1. Hongbin Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Junjian Yi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Junsen Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Junsen Zhang.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Li, H., Yi, J. & Zhang, J. Estimating the Effect of the One-Child Policy on the Sex Ratio Imbalance in China: Identification Based on the Difference-in-Differences. Demography 48, 1535–1557 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0055-y

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0055-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation