Citation
Meng, Lei (2009). Bride Drain: Rising Female Migration and Declining Marriage Rates in Rural China. Working Paper, Xiamen University Department of Economics.Abstract
In this paper, I focus on the fall of the marriage rates of Chinese rural males in their early twenties and study the extent to which the rise in rural young women's participation in migratory work has contributed to this fall. I perform the analysis using the self-collected rural household survey panel data from 1985 to 2005 in Zhijiang municipality, Hubei; and also examine the relationship using a nationally representative data set from the Chinese Household Income Project (1995, 2002 waves). My findings support the following conclusions: (1) A shortage of availability of women brought about by female out-migration presents a problem of bride drain in rural China, a 10 percentage point increase in the local female out-migration reduces rural male marriage propensity by 5%; (2) the impact of the bride drain was felt by both non-migrant and migrant men, but the marriage propensity of migrant men was affcted more by female out-migration than non-migrant men; (3) the more educated the migrant rural men, the less severely their marriage probability was affected by the local female out-migration.