"The World Wide War on Baby Girls" is an insightful and well researched article that focuses on gender disparities. In this summary we will be discussing and reviewing the major of arguments in the article, focusing on the economic intuition and outcomes related to the facts that millions of girls are disappearing from some countries as reported.
In the natural birth decade, the ratio of baby boys and baby girls maintains a natural balance. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. However, sexual disparities tend to rise with not only income and education, but also a country's draconian population controls. In China, the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls, which is biologically impossible without human intervention.
According to the author, there are two main reasons why sexual disparity is widespread. First of all, the marked cultural preference for sons are significant, although not in all traditional societies. In some 'old-fashioned' societies, where the girl is deemed to join her husband’s family on marriage and lost to her parents, parents prefer to have male children, to guarantee care in their older years. The sexual disparities also tend to rise with income and education. It seems to be the case, in parts of India, that richer, and well educated families, tend to have smaller families. However, they feel more pressured to bear a son to whom the family name and wealth can be carried on through. Secondly, the spread of fetal-imaging technology and significant drop of ultrasound scan cost encourage the use of sex selection abortions. Although this type of abortion is lawfully banned, it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection. Therefore, there is no effective regulations to stop this behaviour.
Having millions of women missing from a population can be disastrous, resulting in a