China must solve its daughter deficit
Tsung-Mei Cheng says China must sweep away policies and a cultural mindset that discourage baby girls, to plug a destabilising gender gap. Offering a baby-girl bonus could be a good start
What is most precious in China today? Is it a house, a car or a big bank account? It is none of the above. Arguably, baby girls are what the country needs most.
China has one of the world's most highly skewed sex ratios: for every 100 baby girls born in 2009, 119.5 boys were born. By 2011, the ratio had fallen to 117.8 boys for every 100 girls, suggesting a possible decline - an improvement in this instance. But the ratio is still very high by the standards of the developed world.
This gender imbalance is a product of centuries of gender inequality in traditional societies, where boys have always been preferred over infant girls.
Such inequality in emerging markets was the theme of this year's annual Emerging Markets Symposium held at Oxford University.
The cultural preference for baby boys in many traditional societies, when coupled with modern technology such as ultrasound and easy sex-selective abortions, has led directly to the imbalanced sex ratio at birth in China and India. Recent evidence also shows that more female fetuses are being aborted in Europe than previously thought, especially in the Balkans.
According to demographers, a male-to-female sex ratio at birth of about 106:100 is the current norm, as the mortality rate among male infants and children tend to be higher than among girls.