World Gold Prices, Dowry and Female Infant Mortality in India
Dowry, the transfer of parental assets at the moment of a daughter's marriage, descends from an ancient tradition dating back to at least 200 BC. Although dowry has virtually disappeared with modernization in most of the world, it persists in contemporary India and is becoming increasingly common in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. While the original dowry payments acted as a pre-mortem bequest to daughters that afforded them post-marital financial protection, property rights over dowry are now usually appropriated by the groom and his family rather than being retained by the bride. Dowry acts as a considerable levy on the young women's original families: estimates indicating that it is in the range of 4 to 8 times the annual income of the household. Thus, households often start saving for dowry as soon as a girl is born.
Previous research has argued that dowry costs contribute to the phenomenon of Indian parents' preference for male over female offspring, but there is as yet no systematic evidence of this effect and its import. Due to dowry having been prohibited in India since 1961, official time-series data on dowry are not available, and this makes it hard to analyze its importance. Even if we had data on actual dowry transactions, it could be hard to isolate the influence of changes in the cost of dowry from the effect of family preferences or attributes.
In a joint study, Sonia Bhalotra (University of Essex), Abhishek Chakravarty (Manchester University) and I have considered variation in the financial burden of dowry as dictated by variation in world gold prices. Gold, typically under the form of jewellery, is an integral part of Indian dowries, and since India imports more than 90% of its gold from the rest of the world, fluctuations in international market prices translate into variations in the cost of dowry.
We combined monthly data on international gold prices for 1972–2005 with monthly data on birth cohorts, which include indicators on the survival after birth of male and female infants. Using this large data set with more than 100,000 observations, we found that in months of gold price inflation, the likelihood that a baby girl survived through the neonatal period (i.e., was alive a month after birth) was significantly lower. Importantly, they were statistically significantly different from the likelihood of survival of baby boys. In fact, gold price inflation appears to improve the survival chances of male babies. We also found that girls born in months of rising gold prices had lower chances to make it through to adulthood. This is correlated with parents deliberately depriving girls nutritionally, as it is well known from prior research that nutritional deprivation in early childhood results in lower height in adulthood.
We broke down the results for children born after 1985, since ultrasound technology became widely available across India after the mid-1980s and previous research has shown that parents made the shift from neglecting baby girls after birth, to aborting unwanted girls before birth. For these cohorts, we found that increases in the price of gold during pregnancy are correlated with a decline in the probability that a girl rather than a boy was born. Thus, by one means or the other, parents seem to react to gold price increases by acting to reduce the chances of survival of their female progeny. We conducted various tests on the stability of these results, and our interpretation is that they are a function of dowry costs.
Overall, our research constitutes the first evidence that the financial burden of dowry contributes to a reduction in the share of females in the population stemming from foeticide or neonatal neglect.