Watering the neighbour’s garden

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The rampant demographic masculinization taking place today in several Asian countries, from the Caucasus to East Asia, has been a relatively neglected field in demographic studies, in spite of the central-ity of the "number question" in the understanding of the changing sex discriminatory practices in this part of the world. As we were familiar with two distinct cultural areas in Asia, we had long thought of joining forces to provide the missing comparative perspective called for by the increase in child sex ratios observed across the region. A first trial was the initial meeting organized in India in November 2003 by CEPED (Centre Population et Développement) and INED (Institut national d'études démographiques) and hosted by the French Institute of Pondicherry. The success of this pioneer workshop bringing together demographers working on several Asian countries, and of the subse-quently published collection of papers, encouraged us to embark two years later on a larger project aimed at covering more systematically all affected regions and aspects of the growing sex imbalance in Asia.
This book originates in the international conference "Female defi-cit in Asia" held in Singapore on 5-7 December 2005 during which 29 papers were presented. The event was jointly sponsored by CEPED, CICRED and INED and was organized locally by the Asian MetaCen-tre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. We thank all the involved institutions for their commitment to the project. We also acknowledge further support received from the UNFPA India office and from the Asian MetaCentre, which sponsored several participants. The editors are particularly grateful to Brenda Yeoh (Asia MetaCentre), Annabel Desgrées du Loû, André Quesnel and William Molmy (CE-PED), P.N. Mari Bhat (IIPS), Li Shuzhuo (Xi'an University), François Héran and Jacques Véron (INED) and Gavin Jones (CICRED and Asia Research Institute, Singapore) for their enthusiastic support and help to prepare the conference. We also want to thank Hartati Ayral (CICRED) and Verene Koh Hwee Kiang (Asian MetaCentre) for their accomplished organization of this event in Singapore, which attracted more than forty participants from sixteen different countries.
With one exception, the essays in this volume were presented as papers during the conference. We thank the participants of the confer-ence and the discussants for their helpful editorial suggestions. We are also grateful to the authors for bearing with our often baffling combi-nation of recurrent editorial deadlines and delays. Due to space limita-tions, several papers on various Asian countries had to be omitted. They remain accessible as draft papers on CICRED's website and some of them have already been published elsewhere.
The final preparation of this volume owes considerably to the pro-fessional commitment of Silvia Huix who has supervised the planning of this manuscript by CICRED. Pierre Chapelet and Zoé Headley have also done a splendid job in improving the figures and the revising the written English of the contributions authored by non-native speakers. We also want to thank one another for the pleasure of shared work and friendship.
As the book was going to press, we learned with great sadness that our colleague and friend P.N. Mari Bhat had passed away on 30 July 2007 in Mumbai. Mari had written several seminal analyses of the sex ratio deterioration in India, including the joint paper appearing in this volume. This book is dedicated to his memory.