The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959-1961
2 作者信息
Xin Meng Nancy Qian Pierre Yared
3 出处和链接(比如,NBER working paper No.11000)
http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/pyared/papers/famines.pdf
4 摘要
This paper studies the causes of the largest famine in history, where approximately 30
million individuals died in rural China. We are motivated by the observation that average
rural food retention during the famine seems too high to generate a famine without rural
inequality in food availability. We document two novel facts. First, there is significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions. Second, these rural mortality rates are
positively correlated with per capita food production, a surprising pattern that is unique
to the famine years. This suggests that government redistributive policy contributed to the
spatial variation in famine. To explain these results, we document that the historical grain
procurement policy was inflexible – i.e., Chinese central planners had difficulty aggregating and responding to new information. We then argue that the inflexibility of the grain
procurement policy together with the drop in production in 1959 can explain the observed
variation in famine severity across rural areas
====================
Carol Hua Shiue曾经研究过清代的灾后救助
====================
不完整的中文文献索引:http://www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/Paper ... E6%A3%80++%E7%B4%A2
====================
根据国外某气象数据库0.5*0.5 grid的资料,我计算了灾害前正常年份(1949-1958)和灾害开始年份1959,1960,1961年安徽省的降雨与气温。对农业生产至关重要的3月降水偏低,且夏季气温偏高降水少。