Xin Meng
Nancy Qian
Pierre Yared

ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the institutional causes of China’s Great Famine. It presents two empirical
findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population
subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher
famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based
on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes
in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to
new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.