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Neonatal discrimination and excess female mortality in childhood in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century

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Abstract

The abnormally high sex ratio at birth (SRB) is a demographic outcome that appears in several countries in Asia and Africa and results from sex-based discrimination. Whether or not neonatal discrimination was a widespread response to socioeconomic demands during the demographic transition in Europe remains an open question. To address this concern, this paper exploits the exogenous increase in the cost of child rearing caused by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Using random discontinuity techniques, a sharp and statistically significant increase in SRB appears with the war. This finding provides an opportunity to examine a challenging concern: whether neonatal discrimination fosters or reduces the discrimination suffered by girls in childhood. To examine the multiplier effects of discrimination, the paper investigates the potential role that women’s bargaining power could play in preventing the functioning of the transmission mechanism. To that end, the paper exploits historical geographical differences in women’s bargaining power that were inherent to the predominant kinship system in Spanish provinces (stem vs. nuclear). The results show that an increase of one standard deviation in the interaction term between gender and SRB led, on average, to a 9% points increase in under-five mortality in nuclear provinces. However, this positive relationship is not found in stem provinces, where women had greater bargaining power. The paper points out that policies aimed at creating a more egalitarian legal framework may fail if they are not accompanied by actions aimed at affecting beliefs and preferences for equality in society.

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Availability of data and material

The data I use in this work are publicly available and have been requested from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics.

Notes

  1. The Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia (1889), art. 30, said that, for civil purposes, only a fetus that had a human figure and succeeded in living 24 h entirely unattended from the mother’s womb shall be considered born alive.

  2. The confidence interval is computed from the linear transformation of the 95% confidence interval for the proportion of female births in the study period in Spain, which has an average value of 0.4833, and a standard error of 0.0001.

  3. The data set included missing information for the number of workers in agriculture in 1930 in Girona and Vizcaya provinces. I estimate these two figures by computing the expected agricultural share in 1930, given 1920 and 1940 economic structure. All of the regression outcomes are robust to excluding these observations.

  4. Including provincial fixed effects in columns 4 to 6 do not change the size and significance of the main outcomes, Female, SRB, and of their interaction. However, because of the categorical nature of provinces, including them prevents to identify baseline mortality differences between nuclear and stem provinces.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr. Lidia Farré for the valuable discussions throughout the project and for her help in gathering data, and I am also grateful to Prof. Joseba De la Torre, Prof. M Angeles Eguskiza, Dr. Gregori Galofre, Prof. Javier Hualde, Dr. Javier Husillos, Prof. Mar Rubio-Varas, and the two anonymous Referees for their encouraging feedback. I am also grateful to comments of participants at the Online Seminar on Missing Girls in Historical Europe, organized by Prof. Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia.

Funding

This study was funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through Project CICYT (ECO2015-65031-R).

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  1. Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics (INARBE), Department of Economics, Public University of Navarre (UPNA), Pamplona, Spain

    Rebeca Echavarri

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Echavarri, R. Neonatal discrimination and excess female mortality in childhood in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century. Cliometrica 16, 79–104 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00225-6

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