women has worsened with rising incomes. A more extended discussion of the
phenomenon of missing women can be found in McCartney and Gill (2007).
Many factors influence the biological sex ratio. These include race, timing
of conception, whether the mother smokes, whether parents are both right-
handed, whether pregnancy occurred during a war, hormonal factors, and the
incidence of Hepatitis B (Sieff, 1990; Oster, 2005; Jha et al., 2006). These
factors tend to cancel each other out and the normal biological male–female
ratio at birth is around 0.952. Since the first all-India census in 1901, the
proportion of males in the population has increased. In India as a whole,
between 1901 and 1991, the male/female ratio increased from 1.029 to 1.079.
Within this overall trend, the male–female ratio by the early 2000s varied
widely by state: from high figures in Haryana (1.161), Punjab (1.145) and
Uttar Pradesh (1.109) in the north, to low figures in Kerala (0.945) and more
generally in the southern states (Dyson, 2001:342). India experienced rapid
economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s, with rising urbanization, improved
health and education,but the problem of missing women intensified. The 2011
Indian census showed some improvement in the overall sex ratio, as the life
expectancy of women continued to increase (older women living longer) and
adult female mortality increased faster than male. A striking fact was that the
child sex ratio (CSR), boys/girls, in the 0–6 year range continued to rise, from
1.079 in 2001 to an all-time high of 1.094 in 2011 (John, 2011).
The problem of missing women has appeared in other ‘successful’ develop-
ing countries experiencing rapid GDP growth, urbanization, improved educa-
tion and health, and in some cases rising employment of women. In China the
male–female ratio showed little change during the communist-Maoist era,
being 1.073 in 1953 and 1.070 in 1982, but then increased greatly to 1.208 in
2000 (Naughton, 2007:171). Virtually all of this was accounted for by a rise in
the sex ratio at birth, indicating that gender selective abortions were the likely
driver. In South Korea the sex ratio at birth increased to above 1.10 in the early
1990s (Park and Cho, 1995),although due to a very low overall fertility rate the
demographic impact was smaller than elsewhere. By the mid-1990s global
estimates of missing women ranged from 60 to 101 million (Klasen and Wink,
2003:8). The total estimated figures for missing women are larger than the
combined death tolls of both world wars (Klasen and Wink, 2003:264).
It is important to examine the motives for this catastrophic mortality to
gauge what, if any, policies could improve the situation and expose Easterly’s
argument that ‘investing in people is enough’. A preference for sons, in the
absence of other factors, cannot explain it. Acting on the desire to produce
more sons will lead to higher fertility but not change the gender balance of the
population. Some couples will achieve the desired number of sons early and so
have small families, while others will have larger families including more
girls. Deliberate intervention is needed to alter the gender balance.
This is not a matter of religion. Muslim Pakistan and Confucian China
both have a problem of missing women. The two Indian states with the high-
est male–female ratios Haryana (predominantly Hindu) and the Punjab
Population and Economic Growth/Development 93