# **4. Conclusions**

The data indicate that child sex ratios in China and India are peaking, and are beginning to turn around in several sub-national areas. These trends are easier to detect in China, given its quinquennial census data. Several of China’s provinces (comprising nearly a quarter of the population) show an actual _feminization_ of child sex ratios in recent years, and this is especially striking since many of these provinces had some of the most masculine child sex ratios in China. In provinces comprising nearly another two-thirds of the population, the rate of masculinization has decreased — in many cases strikingly, including in provinces with some of the highest sex ratios. The rest of the provinces (comprising ten percent of the population) continue to show an increasing rate of masculinization of child sex ratios  but with one exception these provinces have sex ratios well below the national average, and are not the major contributors to China’s total “missing girls”. It needs to be remembered, though, that the data do not lend themselves to precise estimates of trend, and we can only draw broad conclusions from them.

In India, the rate of increase in the masculinization of child sex ratios fell in most states by the 1990s. The notable exceptions to this were the northwestern states, which have the highest child sex ratios — the only states with ratios comparable to China’s national average — but which account for less than 5% of the country’s population, and to a lesser extent the two Western states. Our analysis for India is hampered by the lack of middecadal census data. For China, the decadal census data showed little if any sign of a reduction in child sex ratios between the 1980s and 1990s, but when viewed in conjunction with the mid-decadal census data they showed clear evidence of such a reduction. For India, even the decadal census data show evidence of slowing masculinization in most states between the 1980s and 1990s, earlier than in China. It seems likely that in India (as in China) the downward trend in child sex ratios is sharper than that indicated by the blunt instrument of decadal censuses. This is also suggested by the data on reported son preference, which has declined across the country during the 1990s, including in the states with the highest sex ratios (Retherford and Roy 2003).

The data suggest an incipient turnaround in child sex ratios in both China and India. We seem to have been spared the specter of national sex ratios rising to 1.6 boys per girl, as in some localities in China<sup>14</sup> , or 2 boys per girl, as amongst higher order births in South Korea in the early 1990s. The reasons underlying this trend need to be studied carefully, but there are indications that public policy may have played a role in this. For example, it appears that the government programs in China and India to incentivize parents to raise daughters may have had some impact (Li 2007, Sinha and Yoong, 2009). The media has been found to be powerful in changing social norms in many settings, and a study in India found that it had a striking negative impact on son preference in India (Jensen and Oster 2008). Other factors must also be at play, including increasing levels of education and industrialization.

What are the policy implications of our findings? It would be a great mistake to conclude from these findings that efforts to bring down child sex ratios can be relaxed in these countries. This would be analogous to South Korea’s relaxing its efforts at 8