Nowadays, 70 percent of Chinese women believe a man should provide an apartment, along with a marriage offer, . In economic terms, the relative scarcity of women is giving them bargaining power. These women’s demands are making China’s economy grow even faster.

“Rising sex ratios contribute to two percentage points of GDP growth,” says Xiaobo Zhang, a professor of economics at Peking University, who also works at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

His studies have found that up to 25 percent of the growth in China’s economy stems back to the effect of the rising sex ratio. Together with Shang-Jin Wei, from Columbia University, he’s also found that 30 to 48 percent of the real estate appreciation in 35 major Chinese cities is directly linked to a man’s need to acquire wealth — in the form of property — to attract a wife.