Why Rural and Urban Sex Ratios among Young Adults Are Skewed in Most Countries of the World

Michal Gulczynski , Bocconi University

Skewed sex ratios at birth (SRB) have raised questions about marriage squeeze prospects in 12 countries, most notably including China and India. We argue that, more commonly, skewed sex ratios among young adults (SRYA) result from internal and international migration. We find that while 44 countries have imbalanced country-level SRYA, as much as 108 of the 201 investigated countries have either rural or urban imbalanced SRYA in 2015, setting the threshold at the minimal SRB considered as skewed by previous studies. We also find a strong log-linear relationship between sex ratios and population density in sub-national regions in Europe. The study comprises three parts distinguished by the geographical level of analysis. First, we use World Population Prospects data for all countries of the world with total population larger than 90 thousand for the cohort born from 1980 to 1990. We decompose the sex ratios at age 30 at the national level into three factors: SRB, probability of survival of men relative to women and net international migration of men relative to women. Second, we use Urban and Rural Population by Age and Sex to look at the rural and urban sex ratios for the age group 25-34. We also show how they changed over time for this age group and cohort. Third, we employ Eurostat data for six largest EU countries. We show that the local imbalance of SRYA is not related to SRB but to population density, implying a large effect of internal migration.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe