Civil War, Marriage Ban and Sex Ratio: Impute the Prime-age Sex Ratio in Post-war Taiwan Using Censored Data,” 2012, Asian Population Studies, forthcoming.
Abstract
The civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in China during 1945-1949 resulted in an enormous influx of immigrants to Taiwan, majority of who were single male soldiers in their 20s or 30s. In addition, a military marriage ban in the 1950s prevented most of the immigrant soldiers from getting married until 1959. These two factors have profound but distinct influences on the effective prime-age sex ratio in the marriage market in post-war Taiwan. Unfortunately, the official population data in Taiwan — collected through a civilian household registration system — did not include the military and thus did not reveal the true male population until the late 1960s. This paper proposes a method that addresses both concerns of the marriage ban and the data censoring to impute the effective prime-age sex ratio. The imputation result shows that the effective prime-age sex ratio first rose in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s, and then declined in the 1970s. At its peak, the ratio implies that on average as many as 120 men were competing for only 100 women in the marriage market