Political elites and hometown favoritism in famine-stricken China

James Kai-sing Kung and Titi Zhou

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2021, vol. 49, issue 1, 22-37

Abstract: China's Great Leap Famine has remained to this day the severest in human history, and yet few studies have invoked the human factor in explaining its outcome. In sharp contrast to Mao's aggressive extractive policy against the peasantry, the 181 Central Committee (CC) members—the political elite of the Chinese Communist Party—may have alleviated the casualty of this most devastating famine, by arranging more “resale grain” to be shipped to their hometowns. Specifically, having an additional native CC member in a prefecture reduces the excess death of that prefecture by 46,500, accounting for 2.3 percentage points in the death rate when evaluated at the mean. The effect is more pronounced if a CC member worked in the central planning apparatus in charge of grain transfer. Moreover, evidence suggests that the counties with more CC members tended to receive more resale grain, while grain procurement remained affected.

Keywords: Political elites; China's great leap famine; Grain procurement; Grain resale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 N95 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596720300184
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:jcecon:v:49:y:2021:i:1:p:22-37

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2020.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().