WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR’S GARDEN: THE GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC FEMALE DEFICIT IN ASIA WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR’S GARDEN: THE GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC FEMALE DEFICIT IN ASIA Edited by Isabelle ATTANÉ and Christophe Z. GUILMOTO Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography Paris 2007 Chapters in this volume originate from papers presented at an international semi- nar organized by the authors in Singapore on 5-7 December 2005. The seminar has been supported by CEPED (Centre Population et Développe- ment), CICRED and INED (Institut national d’études démographiques) and was hosted by the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. First published in 2007 by CICRED Copyright © 2007 by CICRED CICRED Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography 133, Bd Davout. 75980 Paris Cedex 20 - France. Tel: 33 1 56 06 20 19. Fax: 33 1 56 06 21 65. E-mail: [email protected] ʊ Web site: www.cicred.org ISBN : 2-910053-29-6 To the memory of an exceptional demographer, P.N. Mari Bhat List of Authors Sutapa AGRAWAL is Program Associate at the National Institute of Medical Statistics (NIMS-ICMR), New Delhi, India. Nurul ALAM is Associate Scientist at the Health and Demographic Surveil- lance Unit, ICDDR,B: Centre for Health and Population Research, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Perianayagam AROKIASAMY is Reader at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. Isabelle ATTANÉ is Researcher at the Institut national d’études démographi- ques (INED), Paris, France. Irina BADURASHVILI is the Director of the Georgian Centre of Population Research, Tbilisi, Georgia. Danièle BÉLANGER is Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. P N Mari BHAT was Director of the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India. Alinda BOSCH is Researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demo- graphic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands. Laurel BOSSEN is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Marcus W FELDMAN is Professor at the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, USA. Elspeth GRAHAM is Reader at the School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. Christophe Z. GUILMOTO is Senior fellow at LPED/IRD and Director of CICRED, Paris. Neelambar HATTI is Professor at the Department of Economic History, Lund University, Sweden. Graeme HUGO is Professor of Geography and Director of the National Key Centre for Social Applications of GIS, University of Adelaide, Australia. JIANG Quanbao is Ph.D at the Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. JIN Xiaoyi is at the Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China. Sunil KHANNA teaches at the Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, USA. viii KHUAT Thu Hong is Co-Director of the Institute for Social Development Studies, Vietnam. KIM Doo-Sub is Professor of Sociology at the College of Social Sciences, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. LE BACH Duong is the Director of the Institute for Social Development Studies, Vietnam. LI Shuzhuo is Professor at the Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University. France MESLÉ is Senior Fellow at the Institut national d’études dé- mographiques (INED), Paris, France. Hong Xoan NGUYEN THI is PhD Candidate at the Department of Geo- graphical and Environmental Studies, University of Adelaide, Australia. S. Irudaya RAJAN is Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, India. T.V. SEKHER is Reader at the International Institute for Population Sci- ences, (IIPS), Mumbai, India. SONG Yoo-Jean is Research Professor at the Institute of Population and Aging Research, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. Roma SRIVASTAVA is at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. S. SUDHA is Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. Sayeed UNISA is Reader in the Department of Mathematical Demography and Statistics, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. Jacques VALLIN is Senior Fellow at the Institut national d’études dé- mographiques (INED), Paris, France. Jeroen VAN GINNEKEN, is Honorary Fellow at the Netherlands Interdisci- plinary Demographic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands. WEI Yan is PhD Candidate at the School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University and Associate Professor at Xi’an University of Finance and Economics, Xi’an, China. WU Haixia is at the School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China. A J Francis ZAVIER is Programme Associate at the Population Foundation of India, New Delhi, India. ZHENG Zhenzhen is Professor at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. Foreword The rampant demographic masculinization taking place today in several Asian countries, from the Caucasus to East Asia, has been a relatively neglected field in demographic studies, in spite of the central- ity of the “number question” in the understanding of the changing sex discriminatory practices in this part of the world. As we were familiar with two distinct cultural areas in Asia, we had long thought of joining forces to provide the missing comparative perspective called for by the increase in child sex ratios observed across the region. A first trial was the initial meeting organized in India in November 2003 by CEPED (Centre Population et Développement) and INED (Institut national d'études démographiques) and hosted by the French Institute of Pondicherry. The success of this pioneer workshop bringing together demographers working on several Asian countries, and of the subse- quently published collection of papers, encouraged us to embark two years later on a larger project aimed at covering more systematically all affected regions and aspects of the growing sex imbalance in Asia. This book originates in the international conference “Female defi- cit in Asia” held in Singapore on 5-7 December 2005 during which 29 papers were presented. The event was jointly sponsored by CEPED, CICRED and INED and was organized locally by the Asian MetaCen- tre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. We thank all the involved institutions for their commitment to the project. We also acknowledge further support received from the UNFPA India office and from the Asian MetaCentre, which sponsored several participants. The editors are particularly grateful to Brenda Yeoh (Asia MetaCentre), Annabel Desgrées du Loû, André Quesnel and William Molmy (CE- PED), P.N. Mari Bhat (IIPS), Li Shuzhuo (Xi'an University), François Héran and Jacques Véron (INED) and Gavin Jones (CICRED and Asia Research Institute, Singapore) for their enthusiastic support and help to prepare the conference. We also want to thank Hartati Ayral (CICRED) and Verene Koh Hwee Kiang (Asian MetaCentre) for their accomplished organization of this event in Singapore, which attracted more than forty participants from sixteen different countries. With one exception, the essays in this volume were presented as papers during the conference. We thank the participants of the confer- ence and the discussants for their helpful editorial suggestions. We are also grateful to the authors for bearing with our often baffling combi- nation of recurrent editorial deadlines and delays. Due to space limita- tions, several papers on various Asian countries had to be omitted. x They remain accessible as draft papers on CICRED’s website and some of them have already been published elsewhere. The final preparation of this volume owes considerably to the pro- fessional commitment of Silvia Huix who has supervised the planning of this manuscript by CICRED. Pierre Chapelet and Zoé Headley have also done a splendid job in improving the figures and the revising the written English of the contributions authored by non-native speakers. We also want to thank one another for the pleasure of shared work and friendship. As the book was going to press, we learned with great sadness that our colleague and friend P.N. Mari Bhat had passed away on 30 July 2007 in Mumbai. Mari had written several seminal analyses of the sex ratio deterioration in India, including the joint paper appearing in this volume. This book is dedicated to his memory. IA and CZG TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Isabelle ATTANÉ, Christophe Z GUILMOTO ................................... 1 PART I RECENT TRENDS IN SEX RATIO IN ASIA Imbalanced Sex Ratio at Birth and Female Child Survival in China: Issues and Prospects LI Shuzhuo, WEI Yan, JIANG Quanbao, Marcus W. FELDMAN ..... 25 Sex Ratio at Birth and Excess Female Child Mortality in India: Trends, Differentials and Regional Patterns Perianayagam AROKIASAMY ........................................................... 49 A Sharp Increase in Sex Ratio at Birth in the Caucasus. Why? How? France MESLÉ, Jacques VALLIN, Irina BADURASHVILI .................. 73 Son preference, Female Deficit and Singapore’s Fertility Transition Elspeth GRAHAM............................................................................. 89 PART II DIFFERENTIALS IN DISCRIMINATORY BEHAVIOUR The Geography of Deteriorating Child Sex Ratio in China and India Christophe Z GUILMOTO, Isabelle