| HOW CENTRALLY PLANNED WAS CHINA’S GREAT LEAP FORWARD DEMOGRAPHIC DISASTER? BY (2007) | |||||||||||||||||
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| The millions of deaths that occurred during China’s great famine of 1959-1961 represent one of the world’s greatest civil demographic disasters. Two primary hypotheses have been advanced to explain the famine. One is that China experienced three consecutive years of bad weather while the other is that national policies were wrong in that they reduced and misallocated agricultural production. The relative importance of these two factors to the famine remains widely discussed but highly controversial among China scholars. This paper uses provincial-level demographic panel data and a Bayesian empirical approach in an effort to distinguish the relative importance of weather and national policy on China’s great demographic disaster. Our findings are consistent with the view that national policies were more important than weather in generating the famine. (JEL O53, E65). | |||||||||||||||||
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