The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959-61

Xin Meng (), Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared

No 16361, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.

JEL-codes: N45 O43 P16 P21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-09
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16361.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959-61 (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16361

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16361

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().