Food Availability and Food Entitlements during the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine: A dynamic panel data analysis (In French)

The article aims at identifying socioeconomic factors which explain the Chinese famine of 1959-1961. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the radicalism of Great Leap Forward policies generated both a decline of agricultural output (availability problems) and the implementation of an inadequate food distribution policy which penalised rural populations (accessibility problems). An econometrical analysis with provincial panel data for the period 1954-1966 points out the role of bad political choices on the occurrence of the famine and confirms the simultaneous influence of food availability decline and food distribution issues on mortality rates.