Population aging caused by rise in sex ratio at birth

Abstract

Despite its historical and biological stability, the sex ratio at birth (SRB) has risen in parts of the world in the last several decades. The resultant demographic consequences, mostly on sex imbalance, are well documented, typically including "missing girls/women" and "marriage squeeze." However, the SRB-induced impact on demographic dynamics, particularly its underlying mechanism, has not been explored in depth. We aim to investigate the impact of the SRB rise on the size, structure, and growth of a population, particularly emphasizing on population aging. We provide a simple framework, derived from classical stable population models, to analyze how the SRB rise can reduce the population size and make the population old. We demonstrate that the cohorts born with a higher SRB are smaller in size than those with a lower SRB. As the affected cohorts are born into the population, their smaller size will reduce the total population size, thereby lifting the fraction of old people that were born with the original SRB and have the same size as before. The resultant population aging speed increases as the cohorts with the new SRB take an increasing share of the population. This study adds that, in addition to fertility and mortality, the SRB can be a driving factor of population dynamics, especially when it moves far above normal biological levels.