Socio-economic development and child sex ratio in India: revisiting the debate using spatial panel data regression

The paper aims to explore the possible determinants of declining child sex ratio (CSR) in India across 32 state and UTs over time (viz. 1971–2011). The spatial panel data regression results are assumed to be better compared to simple panel because the CSR is very much influenced by space and neighbouring state’ CSR. This is confirmed by both global (and local Moran Index) in one hand and the Hausman test (fixed vs. random effect) on the other hand. The spatial panel regression results show that income and CSR are nonlinear with U-shaped pattern; the other socio-economic variables like female literacy rate, urbanization, poverty and female work participation do not appear to be significant. The state sharing higher concentration of scheduled tribe community positively improve CSR in all the spatial regression models; the opposite happens in case of scheduled caste dominated state. Our spatial panel regression findings contradict earlier findings of the determinants of CSR in case of income and female literacy. The U-shaped relationship between income and CSR does have some policy relevance; income of any state may go up due to various factors. If we argue in the context of female labour force participation, we find that the female work force participation is found to be stagnant, and even in some state it is declining over the decades. Therefore, female employment directly augments female autonomy as well as empowerment, which indirectly increases income and thereby a state may cross that cut-off level of income and may experience higher CSR.