The Welfare Effects of Land Reform: Lessons from Yunnan, China

Guanghua Wan, Jiansheng Zhang and Congmin Zuo

Journal of Development Studies, 2023, vol. 59, issue 10, 1608-1625

Abstract: Land reform has been perceived to be a major avenue for poverty reduction, amid controversies regarding the impacts of land reform in developing economies. This paper demonstrates how China’s land reform in the 1950s succeeded in reducing hunger and poverty. To be more specific, our paper constructs a theoretical model, deriving hypotheses with respect to the welfare effects of land reform in general. The hypotheses are then empirically tested using a unique data set from China. Our identification strategy of combining propensity score matching (PSM) with Differences-in-Differences (DID) estimations ensures the reliability of causal inferences and analytical results. The paper concludes that China’s land reform in the 1950s significantly improved the welfare of peasants in terms of subsistence living while its effect on non-subsistence welfare was insignificant.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2023.2218001 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:jdevst:v:59:y:2023:i:10:p:1608-1625

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FJDS20

DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2023.2218001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Studies is currently edited by Howard White, Oliver Morrissey and Ken Shadlen

More articles in Journal of Development Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().