G E N D E R A N D E N D O W M E N T S : A C C E S S T O H U M A N C A P I T A L A N D P R O D U C T I V E A S S E T S
back home, and, consequently, a change in families’ preference for having girls. Most societies have some mild degree of preference for sons (Williamson 1976), but the manifestation of extreme sex ratios comes from rather extreme son preferences. The interplay of culture, the state, and political processes appears to generate extreme patrilineality and highly skewed child sex ratios such as in the case of China, northwest India, and Korea (Das Gupta 2009). Chung and Das Gupta (2007) argued that son preference in Korea is correlated with factors such as lower socioeconomic status, rural area residence, higher parental control in terms of arranged marriage and co-residence with the parents, and lower education of the woman. In addition, the manifestation of son preference is also influenced by public policies and the availability of technology. China’s one-child policy and Vietnam’s two-child policy, though intended to reduce fertility, may have put additional pressure on the incentives to have a son and intensify the skewed sex ratios. In fact, Ebenstein (2010) showed evidence of a positive correlation between the fines imposed by China’s one-child policy and the sex ratio. With development and the introduction of prenatal sex determination technology (ultrasound) in the early 1980s, male-tofemale sex ratios became unnaturally very high in a few East Asian countries. Li and Zheng (2009) found a strong impact of the B-ultrasound technology on the sex ratio of second-order births for rural mothers in Fujian province, China, but no effect among first-born children. The recent increase in Vietnam’s sex ratio at birth may be related to supply-side factors, that is, access to quality sex determination technology, rather than to an increasing preference for sons. Ultrasound technology first started to appear in major hospitals in Vietnam during the mid-1990s and was subsequently offered through the private sector (Bélanger et al. 2003), but the quality and availability of medical equipment have improved during the past 10 years. Thus, the proportion of mothers with prior knowledge of the sex of
their fetus rose from 60 percent in 2003 to 73 percent in 2007 (UNFPA 2009). With prior knowledge of the sex of the fetus, families can discriminate through less prenatal investment or even through abortion. In China, as well as other countries with prevalent son preference, mothers are 5 percent more likely to acquire prenatal care and visit an antenatal clinic 10 percent more frequently when pregnant with a boy (Bharadwaj and Nelson 2010). Bélanger and Khuat (2009) examined the timing of abortion among 885 married women in an obstetric hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2003 to study sex-selective abortions, which generally happen during the second trimester of pregnancy. They found that women with more daughters and without a son were more likely to have a second-trimester than a first-trimester abortion. Their estimates suggest that 2 percent of all abortions by women with at least one prior child were intended to avoid a female birth. Given the factors discussed earlier, the literature shows mixed evidence on whether development mitigates or worsens son preference and sex ratios at birth in Asia (Chung and Das Gupta 2007). Development can bring about substantial normative changes within the entire society together with improvements in individuals’ socioeconomic situations, as argued in the case of Korea by Chung and Das Gupta (2007). However, cross-country evidence shows that modernization does not appear to bring down son preference. In South Asia, son preference is greater for women with more education and is increasing over time (Filmer, Friedman, and Schady 2008). Unbalanced sex ratios at birth could be worsened by economic development, as sometimes argued in the literature, since highly educated and wealthier women tend to have better access to technologies. Vietnam’s 2006 population survey shows that the sex ratio at birth is high for women who have a graduate education (113), have highest grade of 10 and above (111), work in a foreign organization (117), and have previous knowledge of the baby’s sex (111). Of women with a graduate degree, 87 percent
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