The pressure on Chinese men to get married will stimulate the country's GDP growth, a Columbia University economist said recently.

According to statistics, China is suffering from a wide gender imbalance. The gender ratio among the population aged between 15 and 30 is 1.15 to 1, meaning that one in nine young men will be unable to find a wife.

This will be good for the country's economic growth, said Shang-Jin Wei, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. To win girls' hearts, young men and their parents have to work hard to get rich, and this will contribute to the country's GDP growth.

However, even though the young men can successfully tie the knot, it won't make them feel really happy, Wei said, because to accumulate wealth, they have to sacrifice their spare time and handle greater stresses.

Besides, the pressure for young men to get married will continue to drive up the country's housing prices, which is a major social problem. For a young man who wants to have a family, his housing needs can be solved by either renting or buying an apartment, but for a girl, living in a rented property is obviously not as attractive as living in one's own house. This makes new apartments more popular than rented houses and pushes up housing prices further.

Yet, working hard won't guarantee every young man a wife, because even when everyone is richer than before, there will still be comparatively poorer guys who the girls will not choose, Wei said.

China's gender imbalance will continue to exacerbate in the next 10 years. Statistics show that in 2014, there are even more boys than girls aged five and 10. This will exert a greater influence on the country's economic development in the medium and long term.

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