WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

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JIANG Q. –I. ATTANÉ –LI S. –M. FELDMAN
taking into account the possible contribution of socioeconomic and
cultural conditions and individual characteristics. From this point of
view, the marriage squeeze, in essence, is a population age-sex structure
problem (Chen, 2004).
In the absence of large-scale international migration, there are
four main factors that contribute to imbalance in a marriage market:
sex ratio at birth (SRB), gender differentials in mortality, changes in
birth cohort size over time, and age gaps between spouses (Beiles,
1994). The sex ratio at birth represents the relative numbers of males
and females in the first stage of life, while gender differentials in
mortality affect the relative numbers that survive to marriageable age.
If marriages always take place between people of the same age, then
the above two factors determine the extent of the marriage squeeze in
terms of excess numbers of one or other sex who have difficulty in
finding suitable spouses. But, in reality, ages at marriage and age gaps
between spouses vary, so changes in cohort size and the distribution of
age gaps between spouses also affect the relative balance between
males and females. Generally speaking, males are older than their
spouse, and this is often considered as an indicator of an innate mating
preference; that is, a biologically based, sex-specific characteristic in
human mating patterns (Davis, 1998). Older males marrying younger
females were shown to be the norm in a study of 29 developing
countries (Casterline et al., 1986). With older males marrying younger
females, an increase in the number of births may lead to a scenario
where the size of a male cohort will be smaller than subsequent female
birth cohorts. On the other hand, when the number of births
decreases, male birth cohorts will be larger than subsequent female
cohorts (Cabré, 2004).
During the 20 th century, the shortage of females and the resulting
excess of males have produced a marriage squeeze in China. At the
1990 census, for instance, there were 19 million unmarried people
between the ages of 25 and 44, and of these 86% were men. The sex
ratio of the marriageable-age population (aged 15 and over) was 144
males per 100 females in 1990 and 145 in 2000 (PCO, 1993, 2002).
This imbalance may be due to the excess female mortality in childhood
and at reproductive ages observed over the past decades in cohorts
born between the 1940s and the late 1970s. Nevertheless, the
proportion of never married men remains quite low. In 1990, only
3.2% of those aged 50 and over were never married. In the future,
China will be confronted with a severe lack of females, which will
entail that million of young males will not be able to find a spouse
(Coale and Banister, 1994; Tuljapurkar et al., 1995; Das Gupta and Li,
1999; Jiang et al., 2005; Poston and Glover, 2005).