GENDER


TAIPEI, TAIWAN Taiwan’s oversupply of men in the 1960s contributed to economic growth.


Te Upside of Too Many Men W


Competition for mates spurs entrepreneurship


hat happens when there are too many men for a given population


of women? Te men become entrepre- neurs, work harder and longer, and save more. Tat’s what two researchers re- vealed in a new IFPRI discussion paper, Te Economic Consequences of Excess Men, on the economic impact of too many marriage-eligible men in 1960s Taiwan.


A Skewed Sex Ratio


In the late 1940s, defeat by the Chinese Communist Party drove 1 million Chi- nese Nationalist Party members—most of whom were young, unmarried men— to Taiwan. Teir arrival skewed the sex ratio in the country of 6 million; by 1950, in the 20–24 age bracket, there were 150 men for every 100 women.


But these bachelors didn’t throw the country’s marriage dynamics off track— at least not immediately. Te head of


6


the Chinese Nationalist Party, Chiang Kai-shek, imposed a marriage ban so that his men would be ready to attack in the event of war with the Communists. He didn’t lift the ban until 1959. Tat’s when competition for mates kicked in.


Get Rich Quick


Examining datasets from the time period (and borrowing a page from Darwin), Simon Chang of China’s Central Uni- versity of Finance and Economics and Xiaobo Zhang of IFPRI discovered the economic consequences of this imbal- anced sex ratio. Tey found that men in 1960s Taiwan engaged in economic behavior to make themselves more at- tractive to potential mates. In short, they tried to get wealthy—fast.


More specifically, to attract the too-small pool of women, these unattached men became enthusiastic entrepreneurs—the


fastest way to accumulate wealth. If they didn’t start new businesses, they worked longer hours to earn more and move up the career ladder.


According to Chang and Zhang, this uptick in entrepreneurship and hard work, sparked by competition for mates, ultimately contributed to Taiwan’s 20th- century economic miracle.


Zhang points out, however, that the goal of the study isn’t to promote government policies to alter a country’s sex ratios.


“Te aim is to show that some aspects of human economic behavior might have a biological root,” he says, “and that fusing a biological perspective with economic analysis can shed new insight on human economic behaviors and outcomes.”


—Susan Buzzelli Tonassi


© 2011 C. Stowers/Panos


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28