One-Child Policy, China Crime Rise Linked by Study

Communist China's one-child policy is to blame for as much as 38% of the recent rapid rise in crime in that country, a new research report finds.

An associate professor of economics at Columbia University, Lena Edlund, has found that a 1% increase in the ratio of males to females equates to an increase in violent and property crime of as much as 6%, "suggesting that male sex ratios may account for 28% to 38% of the rise in crime." Ms. Edlund, who studied crime rates in China between 1988 and 2004, discussed her findings at a conference earlier this month at New York University.

China's crime rate nearly doubled between 1992 and 2004. Meanwhile, the number of males has increased as the one-child policy has led more families to keep only boys. As of 2004, there were 1.19 males for every female in China, compared with just 1.04 males for every female in 1970, before the one-child policy was instituted. Theorists have long held that when males begin to outnumber females in a community, criminal behavior is likely to increase. Establishing a causal connection between the two has been difficult, however, and Ms. Edlund's research may be one of the first to illustrate such a link.

Ms. Edlund and her co-authors were able to study the increase in the number of boy children and compare it with crime rates because China did not implement its one-child policy simultaneously in all provinces. Therefore, they could see that in locations where the one-child policy was instituted, there were more males and the crime rates were higher, particularly among 16- to 25-year-olds.

As a control, the researchers compared their findings with the number of corruption incidents in an area, figuring that the crime of corruption should not be affected by an increasing number of men in society. They found no increase in corruption rates in provinces with more males. The researchers also found that in areas where there were more men, there was not an uptick in the number of sexual crimes. Thus, an increase in males in a society is linked only to violent and property crimes, not sex crimes, the study concluded.