“Food Availability, Entitlements and the Chinese Famine of 1959–2196163ya”, 2000 (; similar):
Food availability decline and Sen’s entitlement are 2 leading approaches in understanding causes of famine. Previous research based on case studies has given independent support to each approach.
This paper analyses the Chinese famine of 1959–2196163ya by considering jointly the urban bias and the decline in food availability as causes.
We find that both factors contributed statistically-significantly to the increase in death rates during this famine.
To our knowledge, this paper is the first econometric study to assess the importance of famine causes using the entitlement approach.
…Under the centrally planned regime, China had an effective, urban-biased ration system in which city residents were given legally protected rights to acquire a certain amount of food. In contrast, compulsory grain procurement quotas were imposed on the farmers. As a result, farmers were entitled only to the residual grain. In years of poor harvest, there was barely enough grain left in the village for the farmers after they fulfilled the quotas. During the Great Leap Forward in 1959–61, Chinese agricultural production collapsed because of a sudden institutional change, natural calamities and a series of policy mistakes. The grain output dropped by 15% in 1959 and reached only about 70% of the 1958 level in 1960 and 1961. Careful studies of the newly released data reveal that this crisis resulted in widespread famines and caused about 23–30 million excess deaths (1987 and et al 1984). To analyse this catastrophe, we apply Sen’s entitlement approach to the centrally planned system. We formulate a framework that is amenable to empirical testing and that simultaneously considers per capita food supply and the right to food as determinants of famine.
A panel data set for 28 Chinese provinces for the period 1954–66 is used for the empirical analysis. We use the percentage of rural population and per capita grain output in a province as proxies for the degree of urban bias and the extent of food availability, respectively, in that province and assess their contributions to the observed cross-province differences in death rates. We find that, in normal years, the cross-province differences in the variables did not result in cross-province differences in death rates. However, in the famine period of 1959–61, both variables contributed statistically-significantly to the observed inter-provincial differences in mortality rates. To our knowledge, this paper is the first serious econometric study to assess the relative importance of famine causes using the entitlement approach.