Better Incentives or Stronger Buffer? Weather Shocks and Agricultural Decollectivization in China† Ying Bai and James Kai-sing KUNG* Hong Kong University of Science and Technology This version, August 2012 † We thank Nancy Qian, Hongbin Li, Justin Lin and Li-an Zhou for detailed com- ments and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We alone are responsible for any remaining errors. * Corresponding author: James Kai-sing Kung, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Phone: (852) 2358-7782, Fax: (852) 2335-0014, Email: [email protected]. Better Incentives or Stronger Buffer? Weather Shocks and Agricultural De-collectivization in China Abstract We exploit variations in the pace of agricultural de-collectivization in China in 19781984 to estimate the possible tradeoffs between alternative farming institutions in terms of stronger work incentives and greater public goods provision. By assuming that work incentives under collective agriculture are inversely related to the severity of China’s Great Leap Famine, we found that provinces with higher death rates tended to de-collectivize their agricultural institutions earlier when struck by bad weather. Conversely, the more successful a province developed its irrigation facilities under collective agriculture the more ready it was to abandon it. Our study highlights the role played by weather adversity and its interactions with the above triggering factors in institutional change. Keywords: Famine, Weather Shocks, Work Incentives, Public Goods Provision, Decollectivization, China. JEL Classification Nos.: Q15, O11 1. Introduction It has been a widely accepted premise that institutions, of which property rights are a crucial part, determine the incentives of resource use and thus economic performance (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001, 2002; North, 1981, 1990, 2005; North and Thomas, 1973, Sokoloff and Engerman, 1997, 2000, among many others). Much less is known about the nature of institutional change (Menard and Shirley, 2005).1 There are, to begin with, few empirical studies of institutional change.2 Moreover, while these few empirical studies find significant regularities (that institutions matter), they “lack a theory that would transform regularities into causal explanation” (Menard and Shirley, 2005: 15), not to mention that institutions are typically endogenous (Engerman and Sokoloff, 2005). China collectivized its agriculture in the 1950s on grounds that a collectivized agriculture could better mobilize the construction of irrigation facilities for counteracting the vagaries of weather, thereby reducing the output variability of crops. After roughly a quarter of a century however, China de-collectivized its agriculture. The decisive switch to family farming was allegedly triggered by a bad drought, which, if not for the ingenious assignment of the “residual claimant” status to the farmers they would not have had the incentives to plant wheat on arid soil (e. g., Yang and Liu, 1987). Unlike when Chinese agriculture was communalized in 1958,3 which took less than one month for virtually all the provinces to comply, the entire process of collectivization had taken several years to complete and exhibited enormous spatial variations. To the extent that agricultural de-collectivization reflected an institutional evaluation of collective agriculture, the varying pace provinces exhibited leads us to 1 Thus Menard and Shirley (2005) lament that we know very little about “how long institutions persist or why and how they change” (p. 15). What we know from the analytical framework that North (1990) proposes is that institutional change entails a rational calculus of the costs and benefits of alternative institutional arrangements, political entrepreneurship, collective action, and the mental or cognitive processes by which humans process information. How these “ingredients” actually interact with each other and how they vary from one case to another are however not elucidated. 2 Alston, Eggertsson, and North (1996) remain to this day the only collection on the subject matter. 3 Chinese agriculture was in fact collectivized in several stages prior to the eventual establishment of the communes in 1958. Since our primary concern here is de-collectivization (of the communes), our reference point is the communalization process. 1 wonder why they differed in the intensity of preferences they had for family farming. Instead of focusing on the endogenous reasoning of why some provinces rushed to de-collectivize their agricultural institutions ahead of others,4 however, we examine how provincial leaders and the people alike were faced with the choice between two specific modes of farming institution—collective versus family—when struck by bad weather in the pertinent decision-making process. Our proposed test is based on the hypothesized reasoning that collective and family farming institutions have their unique strengths and weaknesses in the presence of exogenous weather shocks, so that the choice between them rests essentially on the tradeoffs between incentives—a distinct institutional strength of individualized farming, and public goods (in particular irrigation) provision—something which the collective institutions are far more capable of providing.5 By employing appropriate proxies, we examine the extent to which the varying pace of agricultural decollectivization reflects this tradeoff between work incentives on the one hand, and public goods provision on the other. To proxy incentives, we employ the differing severity of the Great Leap Famine—which varied enormously across China’s provinces—as the pertinent measure of collective agriculture’s ability to respond to negative weather shocks.6 Based on 4 By appealing to a variety of factors, a number of attempts have indeed been made to account for this important institutional change, except that almost all of the proposed explanations suffer from the problem of an endogenous reasoning. The attempted explanations include patterned differences in levels of economic development (which includes output and income) and mechanization, strengths of the collective sidelines (and its corollary sources and levels of income), cropping patterns, the average size of production teams, and so forth, its importance can be reflected in the voluminous literature that attempts to explain the underlying causes of, and spatial variations in, de-collectivization (See, among others, Chung, 2000; Johnson, 1982; Kelliher, 1992; Lin, 1987, 1992; O’Leary and Watson, 1982; Siu, 1989; Unger, 1985-86; Zweig, 1983, 1985). 5 Bradley and Clark (1972) compare the work incentives between household and collective farms in the presence of what they term “stochastic disturbances” of the weather and conclude, unambiguously, that the powerful incentives to deal with such exogenous shocks could only be solicited on the private farms. 6 The Great Leap Forward was conceived to accelerate the transformation of China’s predominantly agrarian economy to attain a rate of development unparalleled in history. A distinct hallmark of China’s Great Leap Forward was what may be regarded as the excessiveness of collectivization, whereby already sizeable collectives were further amalgamated into gigantic communes with no due regard paid to the importance of individual material incentives in work organization and income distribution (Donnithorne, 1967; Dutt, 1967; Lin, 1990; Perkins and Yusuf, 1984; Riskin, 1987). It is estimated that 2 the example of Anhui—the first province to have abandoned collective agriculture as well as being one of the most famine-stricken provinces during the Great Leap, our underlying hypothesis is that the severity of the Great Leap Famine represents an inverse measure of collective agriculture’s ability to respond to negative weather shocks; the more severe the famine the faster the people preferred to exit from collective farming at a time when they had the chance to make the switchover to family farming.7 In short, we conjecture that poor weather has likely strengthened the perception that collective agriculture could not protect farmers from natural disasters. By the same token, given the tradeoffs between work incentives and public goods provision, we test how variations in the latter—specifically irrigation facilities accumulated in the course of collective agriculture—may bear upon the proclivity to de-collectivize. Similar to the “incentive hypothesis”, we conjecture that the proclivity to exit a collectivized agriculture would be stronger in provinces where better irrigation facilities had already been constructed during the collective era, for the simple reason that these public goods would better help a de-collectivized agriculture to deal with the adverse weather, thereby reducing the potential costs of family farming—an institution weak (at least in principle) in providing the necessary public goods. Using both OLS and dynamic panel model (the latter estimated using the system-GMM method), we obtain robust empirical results to substantiate the hypotheses that the severity of the famine does increase the effect of weather adversity experienced during de-collectivization, thereby leading to an earlier adoption of family farming. Similarly, better irrigations attained under collective agriculture also reverse the effect of negative weather shocks during de-collectivization; it too is expected to result in an earlier adoption of family farming. Our empirical results re- 16.5-30 million excess deaths and about 30 million lost or postponed births may have resulted from the Great Leap Famine (Ashton et al., 1984; Banister, 1984; Coale, 1984; Peng, 1987, among others). 7 Yang (1996) argues that a major crisis such as the Great Leap Famine has the power of “exposing the vulnerability of existing institutions and reshaping actors’ motivations and preferences”, thereby pushing “the actors to choose from among alternative institutions” (p. 14). 3 main robust after we control for the preferences of the provincial governments in regard to their choice of farming institutions,8 and factors correlated with both the Great Leap Famine and other aspects of public goods provision, and exclude the outlying instances where the pertinent famine was extremely severe. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2 we provide a descriptive account of the institutional changes in Chinese agriculture for the entire period of 1950-1984. In Section 3, we present our hypotheses, introduce our data sources and account for the rationale employed in constructing the pertinent variables. After laying out our empirical strategy in Section 4, we discuss the empirical results in Section 5. Section 6 summarizes and concludes the paper. 2. Institutional Change in Chinese Agriculture, 1950-1984 China collectivized its agriculture in the 1950s and de-collectivized it approximately three decades later, completing a full circle of socialist agriculture in a little more than a quarter of a century. The chronology of the collectivization of Chinese agriculture is illustrated in Figure 1, where the main (longest) curve, which charts the changing degree of collectivization over time, represents the percentage share of households engaged in collective organizations for the entire 1950-1984 period regardless of the type of collective units to which a household belonged. It shows that the percentage of farm households engaged in collective farming increased steadily from a little over 10% in 1950 to more than 90% in 1956, when collective farming stabilized and remained constant for nearly a quarter of a century (circa. 1956-1979), before dropping to nearly zero in 1984. The other three shorter lines illustrate what may be regarded as the “evolution” of the three principal forms of cooperatives/collectives before collectivization reached its peak in 1958, which culmi- 8 The extent to which central and provincial governments were involved in the process of China’s agricultural de-collectivization has been a subject of heated debate. In light of the temporal variations among provinces in adopting the new farming institution, Chung (2000) suggests that provinces were allowed the discretions to experiment with various forms of non-collective farming in the first few years before it became universally preferred and sanctioned by the new leadership. This interpretation is consistent with the experimentation-cum-evaluation approach adopted by the Chinese government (Heilmann, 2008; Rodrik, 2008; Ravallion, 2009). 4 nated in a nationwide communalization movement. There were three main kinds of collective organizations before 1958, namely the Mutual Aid Teams, the Elementary Agricultural Cooperatives, and the Advanced Agricultural Cooperatives (Lin, 1990, 1994). Figure 1 about here Mao believed that, by increasing the farm acreage served by irrigation, collectivization would help to reduce the stochastic disturbances of weather on laborintensive agriculture, thereby raising agricultural productivity. Mao indeed saw a vastly decentralized agriculture as being not conducive to large-scale irrigation works, as public projects of this nature typically span large areas and thus require sizeable administrative units for efficacious management and coordination. Secondly, Mao believed, erroneously, that there were economies of scale in team production (Bradley and Clark, 1972; Nolan, 1988). The fact that total factor productivity in Chinese agriculture had remained more or less stagnant, even after correcting for the “excesses” of the Great Leap, for nearly two decades has been invoked as evidence bearing upon the work incentive problem in collectivized agriculture (e.g., Lin, 1990). China began de-collectivizing its agriculture soon after the demise of Mao and the downfall of the “Gang of Four”. The most famous and probably the first production team in China to have carved up the collective holdings—Xiaogang in Anhui Province—is said to have done so because of bad weather. A main catalyst, according to many, was that a serious drought, caused by a ten-month lack of rain in 1978, had adversely affected over 90% of Anhui’s cultivated land, to the extent that it became nearly impossible for the peasants to plant wheat (see, e.g., Yang and Liu, 1987). The practice of contracting output responsibility allegedly began when some peasants, on incentive grounds, requested that the land be carved up and rented to individual households or work groups—a sub-unit of the (already smallest) production team—for cultivation. 5 Compared with collectivization, the process of de-collectivization differed across provinces and took altogether six years to complete whereas the communes were established within a matter of months. The “tolerance” of the provincial authorities to the shift back to family farming was noted to be especially profound during the initial period of 1978 through June 1981, when the adoption rate was a mere 37.9% (Chung, 2000).9 The most telling evidence of the central government’s early tolerance of local autonomy in terms of farming is the observation that some provinces, dubbed the “pace-setters”, allegedly took advantage of the government’s initial cognizance of the varied conditions in different regions—a Chinese principle known as yindi zhiyi. This principle permitted or even encouraged province-wide experimentation with, and diffusion of, local innovations related to family farming. Conversely, despite the fact that some provinces had endeavored to resist the switch to family farming even after official policy had already made it clear that it should now (around mid-1982) be established as China’s primary farming institution, these “recalcitrant” provinces eventually succumbed to political pressure from the center, thereby drawing collective agriculture to a close by the end of 1983, when roughly 98% of the farm households in China switched to farming on an individualized basis (the right-hand side of the main curve, Figure 1).10 3. Hypotheses Collective and household farming represent two very different institutions in terms of supplying work incentives and indivisible or “lumpy” public goods such as irrigation, the choice of which depends, among other considerations, on their capabilities to handle negative weather shocks. Based on the evidence that a severe drought had triggered the dismantling of collective farms in Anhui Province in 1978, it becomes clear that a distinct advantage of household farming lies in its provision 9 By the end of 1982 the state decided not only to sanction family farming but also to have it universally implemented across China. The compliance rate for the longer period ending in December 1982 was 80.6%, according to Chung (2000, p. 67). 10 Prominent examples of these “recalcitrant” provinces included the northeastern part of China (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) and provinces with high agricultural productivity and output that had also developed a number of profitable “sideline” economic activities by the local collectives, most notably Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces (Chung, 2000; Zweig, 1983). 6 of powerful work incentives to the farmers. However, a household-based farming system is ill-suited to providing indivisible public goods such as irrigation projects, which are crucial for dealing with negative weather shocks.11 There is indeed evidence to show that, compared with the huge increase experienced during the collective era, the effectively irrigated area (EIA) had actually declined between 1979 and 1986 for as many as seven Chinese provinces (Stone, 1988). Consistent with this observation, Vermeer (1998) also finds micro-level evidence that agricultural decollectivization, which rendered the commune defunct, had resulted in the ill maintenance of water conservancy facilities.12 Thus, a village faces the tradeoff between stronger work incentives and better public goods provision when choosing an optimal farming institution. But the decision need not be complicated. When the benefits (of stronger work incentives) resulting from adopting household farming outweigh the losses (of lesser public goods provision), a village would employ household farming, and vice versa. Owing to the free rider problem (inherent in “team production”) in collective institutions and accordingly their failure to provide sufficiently strong work incentives, which was an important contributing factor to the Great Leap Famine (Lin, 1990), provinces with a less severe famine are, by implication, less likely to face severe incentive problems. It follows that provinces with a more severe famine would more likely face severe incentive problems, and thus had a greater proclivity to adopt household farming earlier. This would especially be the case when, in the process of making the important decision on institutional choice they were struck by negative weather shocks. Based on this reasoning, we formally hypothesize that: 11 The use of corv’ee labor in collective agriculture is the singular most important reason why largescale irrigation projects can be more effectively provided. Indeed, an important economic rationale behind agricultural collectivization in China in the 1950s was to overcome the institutional deficiency of a vastly decentralized small peasantry. Chairman Mao believed that, compared with an individualized peasantry, the collectives could mobilize more effectively the construction of large-scale irrigation projects crucial for reducing the variability of farm output caused by weather adversity (Nolan, 1988). 12 While this undoubtedly represented an important cause of the decline, conflicts over water use had allegedly resulted in damaged installations and sabotage of existing facilities (see Li, Ding and Yang, 1983). 7 Hypothesis 1: The effect of weather adversity intensifies the effect of the severity of famine, in that poor weather and a severe famine experience combined to accelerate the rate of de-collectivization. This implies that, in provinces where the Great Leap Famine was severe, poor weather at the time of de-collectivization would accelerate the rate of decollectivization. It also follows from the above discussions that, even though collective institutions can mobilize the construction and maintenance of irrigation projects more effectively, the marginal effects of such new constructions are conditional upon the prevailing levels of irrigation facilities henceforth accumulated. Where the EIA was already high by 1978 (we call this initial irrigation condition), the benefits to be expected from the continuing effort of the collectives would be small; for these villages, they would have more to gain by switching to household farming. This brings us to our second hypothesis. Hypothesis 2: The effect of weather adversity intensifies the effect of public goods or specifically irrigation conditions, in that poor weather and an effective irrigation combined to accelerate the rate of de-collectivization. This implies that, in provinces with effective irrigation, poor weather at the time of de-collectivization would accelerate the rate of decollectivization. In setting up our hypotheses, it needs to be emphasized that bad weather at the time of de-collectivization likely has the possible effect of strengthening rather than dismantling the collective institutions of agricultural production, mainly because collectives should be better able to facilitate mutual aid cooperation among farmers in fighting natural disasters. It is only when it interacts with the incentive 8 (famine) and public goods (irrigation) variables that we expect a reversal in the sign of its coefficient. 4. Estimation Strategy 4.1 Definition of Variables Testing our proposed hypotheses requires measuring the varying pace of decollectivization across provinces during 1978-1984—our dependent variable. While a variety of responsibility systems had been adopted during the evolution from collective to household farming, such as contracting to the (small) group, for the sake of consistency, we employ in our estimations only that variant known as “contracting everything to the household” (da baogan). This variant ultimately became the standard or universal practice. Information on the pace of de-collectivization comes primarily from two sources. Data for the initial 1978-82 period are meticulously compiled in Chung (2000), whereas those for the final two years are based upon the Compendium on Agricultural Collectivization since the Founding of the People’s Republic, edited by Huang, Yu, and Wang (1992). Assuming that all farm households were in the communes in 1978, the overall pace of de-collectivization for the country as a whole is indicated on the left-hand side of Figure 1. Our key explanatory variable is the weather; its indices are usefully provided in Report on China’s Natural Disasters [Zhongguo Zaiqing Baogao] (Ministry of Civil Affairs, 1995, see Appendix 1 for details). According to this compendium, adverse weather is defined as “the area covered by natural disasters in each province” (shouzai mianji), measured in terms of: 1) drought; 2) floods; 3) gusts and hailstorms; and 4) frost and cold.13 By summing the total area of natural disasters caused by (1) to (4) above, we are able to generate a natural disaster index for 29 Chinese provinces for the period 1978-1984. With dit defined as the percentage of total arable land in 13 To the extent that different types of institutions have varying capabilities of responding to natural calamities, the area “affected” by natural disasters (chengzai mianji) is endogenous to institutional choice. But the area “covered” by natural disasters (shouzai mianji), which typically is larger than the affected area, is not determined by institutional choice. 9 province i covered by various climatic disasters in a given year t ,14 adverse weather can be expressed as AWit = (d it − 1 1 dit ) /( ∑ dit ) . Since we normalize AWit by the ∑ T t T t average percentage of sown area affected in province i between 1978 and 1984, it can be interpreted as measuring the shock in a given year t in province i relative to the normal weather conditions. The pertinent variables, including definition and sources, are summarized in Table 1. Table 1 about here Our second key independent variable is the relative severity of the famine, and we employ the provincial death rate series for the period of 1959-61. Following Chen and Zhou (2007), the excess death rate is calculated as the difference between the annual death rate ( rit ) during the famine period and the average death rate of 1956-1958 ( ri 1956−58 ), which can be expressed as ritexcess = rit − ri 1956−58 . In Figure 2, we divide all the provinces into two groups based on the maximum excess death rate and find that provinces that experienced severe famine tended to de-collectivize earlier. Figure 2 about here Our third key explanatory variable is provincial variations in initial irrigated condition (at the outset of de-collectivization in 1978), given that it is likely correlated with collectivization (or the degree of de-collectivization). In order to estimate this effect, we add an interaction term between adverse weather and the percentage of ( ) irrigated acreage in 1978 in our estimation.15 Denoted as I i78 − I 78 , I i78 stands for the percentage of irrigated acreage of province i in 1978, whereas I 78 stands for the mean percentage of irrigated acreage of all provinces in the same year. We ( ) use I i78 − I 78 instead of I i78 because it is more meaningful to examine the coefficient 14 15 This is the sown acreage covered by climate disasters (shouzai mianji) divided by total sown acreage. We obtain this variable from Comprehensive statistical data and materials on 50 years of new China. 10 of weather adversity at average levels of per capita grain availability than when I i78 equals to zero. 4.2 Econometric Method We begin with a baseline model in which the effect of adverse climatic variations (and its interactions with famine severity and initial irrigation acreage) on the gradual variations in the degree of de-collectivization from the benchmark year 1978 through 1984 is estimated, using the pertinent panel data which includes the yearspecific effects: yit = X it β + λt + vit t = 1, 2," , T (1) where yit measures the percentage of households adopting household responsibility during year t , X it are the key explanatory variables including weather adversity ( AWit ), famine death rate ( ri max ), initial irrigation condition ( I i1978 ), and the two pertinent interaction terms AWit * ri max amd AWit * I i1978 , by province, and λt is the timespecific effect for year t and vit is the residual error term. We firstly use OLS to estimate equation (1), and then control for the unobserved province-specific effect α i as follows: yit = X it β + α i + λt + vit t = 1, 2," , T (2) 5. Empirical Results 5.1 Baseline Results The results of our baseline model are presented in Table 2. The number of observations is 126 after dropping the missing data. Altogether we perform six regressions. In estimations that include both the year of maximum excess death rate ( ri max ) during the Great Leap Famine and its interaction with weather adversity (columns (1) and (2)), we may interpret the coefficient of weather adversity as representing the sole effect of weather (in the extreme instance) where excess death rate equals zero, i.e., no famine severity. In both estimations, weather adversity correlates negatively with the percentage of households adopting the Household Responsibility System. 11 For instance, if the area affected/struck by natural disasters (comprehensively defined) is twice the average (i.e., AWit equals 1), the fraction of farm households adopting the Household Responsibility System is approximately 18.497 percent lower (column 1) than if there were no famine during 1959-61, i.e., ri max = 0 . Consistent with our expectation is the positive correlation found between the interaction term (between weather adversity and famine severity) and the degree of decollectivization. As expected, the effect of adverse weather turns positive either where the maximum excess death rate is higher than 19.47 thousandths (or 1.947%) (Column 1: 18.497/0.950). These evidences lend support to our first hypothesis (H1). Table 2 about here Also reported in Table 2, the estimation results show that differences in irrigated acreage do have the expected effect of dismantling the collective fabric of China’s agricultural institutions in the presence of an exogenous weather shock (columns (3) and (4)). In these estimations, the interaction term between weather adversity and irrigated acreage is highly significant. This result implies that provinces with proportionately greater irrigation acreage in 1978 tended to dismantle their communes when struck by bad weather. For instance, if the area affected/struck by natural disasters (comprehensively defined) is twice the average (i.e., AWit equals 1), the fraction of farm households adopting the Household Responsibility System is approximately 1.294 percent higher (column 4) if the irrigation acreage is 1 percent above the sample average. In Columns (5) and (6), we include both famine severity and initial irrigation condition. Our baseline results do not change: weather adversity is negatively correlated with the percentage of households adopting the Household Responsibility System when excess mortality is equal to zero and irrigation acreage is equal to the sample mean. Moreover, the two pertinent interaction terms have significant effects on the dependent variable. 5.2 Dynamic Panel Model 12 Since the percentage of households adopting household responsibility in a given year might be affected by the degree of de-collectivization ( Yi t −1 ) in the previous year, it is necessary to include the lagged dependent variables in the regressions. Thus we employ a dynamic panel model as follows: L yi t = ∑ ρlYi t −l + X i t β + α i + λt + vi t (3) l =1 Where Yi t −l is the l th lagged degree of de-collectivization and ρl is the parameter associated with it. To estimate all the pertinent parameters consistently, we need to account for the dynamic structure of the model as well as to control for the unobserved province-specific effects. Given that yit = Yi t − Yi t −1 , equation (2) can be rewritten as follows: L Yi t = (1 + ρ1 )Yi t −1 + ∑ ρlYi t −l + X i t β + α i + λt + vi t (4) l =2 Equation (3) can be estimated using the “difference GMM” method developed in dynamic panel models by Holtz-Eakin, Newey, and Rosen (1990), Arellano and Bond (1991) and Arellano and Bover (1995), in which the equation is first differenced in order to purge the province-specific effect, followed by the use of lags of the explanatory variables as instruments for their differences. The potential bias conceivably generated by this particular difference estimator is dealt with using the “system GMM” estimator (Arellano and Bover, 1995; Blundell and Bond, 1998). To present the empirical results accurately, we will report the significance of the second-step GMM estimator, whose standard error is under-estimated, and the p-value based on the Windmeijer-corrected (2005) standard errors. The validity of the GMM estimator is premised on the satisfaction of two required conditions.16 The first is that the error term vit has to be serially uncorrelated. Specifically, a serially uncorrelated error term means that the first-differenced error 16 In testing the estimator’s validity we use the two specification tests suggested by Arellano and Bond (1991), Blundell and Bond (1998), and Bond (2002). 13 term Δvi t should have significant first-order serial correlation but insignificant second-order serial correlation, which can be tested by the test-statistics m1 and m2 for the GMM estimator developed by Bond (2002). Another condition required for the assumption of the validity of GMM estimates is that the instruments are exogenous. Under the null hypothesis of joint validity, the vector of empirical moments 1 ˆ Z ′E N is supposed to randomly distribute around zero. Both Hansen (1982) and Sargan (1958) suggest that when the error is non-spherical as in the robust one-step GMM, the Hansen-statistic from a two-step estimate is theoretically superior. Estimation results of the dynamic panel models are presented in Table 3. Since all the m1 and m2 statistics indicate that the first-differenced error-term has significant first-order serial correlation but no significant second-order serial correlation, the null hypothesis of no serial correlations for the level error terms cannot be rejected. The p-value of the Hansen-statistics indicates that the over-identifying restrictions are not rejected. As for the estimation results, the coefficient of the lagged share of collective production teams is significant, indicating that gradual changes in the degree of decollectivization does exhibit strong time-dependent properties. Consistent with the results in Table 2, the effect of weather adversity is negative and significant in both the first-step and second-step estimations. Same as before, the interaction term between famine severity and adverse weather is positive and significant. For instance, the effect of adverse weather turns positive where the maximum excess death rate is higher than 22.38 thousandths (column 3: 29.447/1.315), or where the average yearly excess death rate is higher than 9.885 thousandths (column 2: 27.074/2.739), respectively. These results lend further support to H1. Similarly, the interaction term between initial irrigation condition and adverse weather is positive and significant, lending support to H2. Table 3 about here 14 We employ this alternative specification because we do not know a priori whether or not we should include the lagged dependent variables in our estimations. Given that estimates based on Fixed Effects and Dynamic Panel models have a useful bracketing property, we can employ both in our estimations and allow them to help us check the robustness of our findings. Consider, for instance, the interaction between weather adversity and famine severity ( AWit * ri max ), which has a positive coefficient. If we estimate with a Fixed Effects model in the instance where the lagged dependent variables should have been included, we would have overestimated the positive effect of the interaction term. Conversely, if we employ a Dynamic Model as the estimator when the lagged dependent variables should not have been included, the resulting coefficients would be too small (Angrist and Pischke, 2009). In our estimations of AWit * ri max , the pertinent coefficient resulting from employing the Fixed Effects model is 1.305 (Column 6 in Table 2), whereas that of the Dynamic Panel model is 1.300 (Column 3 in Table 3). The narrow range of the results between the two estimators are thus solid evidence that our estimates of the interaction term between weather adversity and famine severity are sufficiently robust. The same is true for our second dependent variable—the interaction between weather adversity and irrigation. Although the range of the estimation results between the two methods is ( ) much larger—the upper bound, AWit * I i78 − I 78 , is 1.523 (column 6 in Table 2), the lower bound, AWit * ri max , is 1.323 (column 3 in Table 3)—they both significantly reject the null hypothesis ( β = 0 ). 5.3 Robustness Check – Outliers Given that the results might be driven by a few provinces with extremely high famine mortality, we address the potential problem of possible outliers. To ensure that our empirical results are robust, we drop the three provinces with the most severe mortality rates; they are: Anhui, Sichuan and Guizhou, whose maximum excess death rate is: 56.7 thousandths, 38.1 thousandths and 35.4 thousandths, respectively. In addition, these three provinces also differ from the others in that they all adopted the Household Responsibility System before it was sanctioned by the central 15 government for its nationwide implementation in April 1982.17 To check that our empirical results are not driven by these three provinces, we drop them from our sample and repeat the same regressions again based on the specifications of Table 2. As shown in Table 4, weather adversity and its interactions with famine severity and initial irrigation condition remain highly significant, which reaffirms both of our hypotheses. Table 4 about here 5.5 Robustness Check – Role of Government As mentioned earlier, political scientists have debated heatedly on the role played by the government—both central and provincial—in China’s de- collectivization process. The experimental (gradual) nature of family farming, and the varying pace by which provinces de-collectivized their agricultural institutions, together suggest that the two uppermost levels of government had likely played a decisive role in this profound institutional change.18 To ensure that our empirical results are not biased by the omission of the possible role of the central and provincial governments in controlling which provinces were to be de-collectivized first, we control for the role of the government (or rather “provincial spontaneity”) by generating a dummy variable ( Si ), which includes those provinces with more than 50 per cent of the households having adopted the Household Responsibility System by April 1982, a time when the new farming institution had proven superior in productivity terms and on which basis the central government decided to push for its implementation nationwide (Chung, 2000).19 According to this reasoning all provinces are divided into two groups: those already adopted the new farming institution prior to the sanctions of the central government ( Si = 1 ), and those instructed to implement it 17 For instance, roughly 43 percent, 22.4 percent, and 61.8 percent of the households in, respectively, Anhui, Province, Sichuan Province, and Guizhou Province already switched to farm on an individualized basis by the end of 1980. 18 A distinct feature of China’s economic reforms after Mao is the willingness of the new leadership to embrace a gradual, experimental approach, whereby new policies were tried out in certain localities first before they were scaled up upon proven successful (see Heilmann, 2008; Rodrik, 2008; and Ravallion, 2009). The fact that certain pioneering provinces were approved whereas others prohibited during the initial phase of the experiment suggests that the provincial governments did play a role in affecting the pace of agricultural de-collectivization (see Zweig, 1997, especially p. 157). 19 Specifically, data limitations require us to use yearend 1981 as the cut-off point. 16 only after universal laws and regulations were drafted ( Si = 0 ). As with the other two robustness checks, we also include an interaction term between “provincial spontaneity” and weather adversity ( Si * AWit ). Reported in Table 5, the results of these estimations show that sanctions by the government to experiment with the alternative of household farming does have the expected effect of dismantling the collective fabric of China’s agricultural institutions. What has not changed is that our key explanatory variables remain significant and robust even after controlling for this effect. Table 5 about here 5.5 Robustness Check – Role of Food Availability, Grain Procurement and “Urban Bias” To ensure that the relationship between excess deaths of the Great Leap Famine and agricultural de-collectivization is not spurious, we control for the omitted variable of the provincial differences in the standard of living, as it might be correlated with famine severity. Intuitively, the standard of living might be correlated with famine severity and we may think of the institutional choice in question as depending on how close to minimum subsistence households were, with the assumption that the farther away they were from it the more likely collective institutions were to persist in the event of an adverse weather shock at the time of decollectivization. Moreover, existing studies on the Great Leap Famine suggest that its severity was affected also by the provincial variations in grain procurement (Kung and Chen, 2011; Kung and Lin, 2003; Meng, Qian and Yared, 2010). Hence we also control for variations in per capita grain procurement in 1978 in this robustness check. To proxy for the standard of living (or “the distance to minimum subsistence”), we employ per capita food availability, which is estimated using data on provincial grain output and procurement.20 Denoted as (f 78 i − f 78 ) , f i 78 stands for 20 We obtain this variable from Materials of Agricultural Economy [Nongye Jingji Ziliao] (Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry And Fisheries, 1983). 17 per capita grain availability of province i in 1978, whereas f 78 stands for the mean ( ) per capita grain availability of all provinces in the same year. We use fi 78 − f 78 instead of f i 78 because it is more meaningful to examine the coefficient of weather adversity at average levels of per capita grain availability than when f i 78 equals to zero. Similarly, we use net procurement per capita, namely total grain procurement per capita minus return selling per capita, to proxy for the effect of government control.21 ( ) Denoted as pi78 − p 78 , pi78 stands for per capita net grain procurement of province i in 1978, whereas p 78 stands for the mean per capita net grain procurement of all provinces in the same year. We also control for what Lin and Yang (2000) term “urban bias”, as it is found to be correlated with famine severity.22 We do so by controlling for the initial share of ( ) urban population in a province, denoted as ui78 − u 78 , where ui78 stands for the share of urban population of province i in 1978, whereas u 78 stands for the mean share of urban population of all Chinese provinces in the same year. Reported in Table 6, the results of these estimations show that differences in “distance to minimum subsistence” do not have the expected effect of sustaining the collective fabric of China’s agricultural institutions in the presence of an exogenous weather shock. However, the interaction between grain procurement per capita with weather adversity is significantly and negatively correlated with the adoption of Household Responsibility System. This result suggests that provinces with higher per capita grain procurement in 1978 were more likely to be controlled more tightly by the provincial government, and thus tended to postpone dismantling their communes when struck by bad weather. However, “urban bias” has no significant effect 21 The underlying idea is that for ease of grain procurement governments in provinces with larger procurement quotas were more likely to hold on to collective agriculture. 22 For these authors, “urban bias” essentially implies systemic differences in grain entitlement based on one’s origin of residence (primarily between urban and rural)—with the urban population guaranteed a fixed amount of grain consumption whereas the rural counterparts only the “residual”—hence the “bias”. 18 on de-collectivization in the presence of adverse weather shocks. More importantly, our key explanatory variables remain significant after these additional controls. Table 6 about here 5.6 Robustness Check – Role of Other Public Goods To ensure that the positive relationship between the interaction term and the adoption of the Household Responsibility System is not spurious, we control for other measures of public goods. If a significant relationship between these alternative measures of public goods and de-collectivization is found, then it is possible that the significant relationship between irrigation and de-collectivization is caused by some omitted variables. Conversely, a lack of a significant relationship between these two variables will lend support to our finding that the relationship between irrigation and de-collectivization is not spurious. In this connection our first control variable is machinery, denoted as (m 78 i − m78 ) , where mi78 stands for per hectare machinery power of province i in 1978, and m78 the mean per hectare machinery power of all Chinese provinces in the same year. The second pertinent control variable is per capita electricity usage, denoted ( ) as ei78 − e 78 , where ei78 refers to per hectare electricity usage of province i in 1978, and e 78 the mean per capita electricity usage of all Chinese provinces in the same year. Reported in Table 7, the estimation results show that differences in machinery power do not have any significant effect on agricultural de-collectivization in the presence of an exogenous weather shock (Columns (1) and (2)). The same results apply to electricity usage; its interaction with weather adversity is not significant (Columns (3) and (4)). Together, these results suggest that provinces better “endowed” with public goods other than irrigation tend not to dismantle their communes immediately when struck by bad weather, hence ruling out the possibility that the signifi- 19 cant relationship found between irrigation and de-collectivization is caused by omitted variables. Table 7 about here 6. Summary and Conclusion Compared with the incentive effect of institutions on economic performance, relatively little is known about how institutional change actually comes about. The de-collectivization of agriculture in China, in particular the varying pace at which provinces in China switched to the new institution of household farming, provides us with an excellent social laboratory to empirically examine the tradeoffs between the pros and cons associated with the two farming institutions from which farmers and officials alike were allowed to choose. Our study is premised on the reasoning that collective farm institutions, while efficacious in providing the “lumpy” public goods such as irrigation, fail to provide sufficiently strong work incentives; in particular when faced with negative weather shocks. Our pertinent research question is thus how actors—provincial officials and the people in this instance—make the decision on how soon they want to switch over to the new farming institution. By employing provincial variations in mortality to proxy incentives, and differences in initial irrigation conditions to proxy public goods provision, we found that provinces having suffered from poor incentives but benefited from good irrigation conditions made the same unwitting choice to de-collectivize earlier when struck by bad weather. In short, adverse weather, when interacted with either poor incentives or good irrigation, has a reversed, accelerating effect on agricultural decollectivization. Part of our finding helps to explain why, for instance, the first province to drop the collective system, Anhui, also happened to have been among the provinces with the highest number of casualties from the Great Leap. 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Compendium on Agricultural Collectivization since the Founding of the People’s Republic (Jianguo Yilai Nongye Hezuohua Shiliao Huibian); 1978-1982: Jae Ho Chung, 2000. Central Control and Local Discretion in China: Leadership and implementation During Post-Mao De-collectivization; 1983-1984: Huang, Yu, and Wang, 1992. Compendium on Agricultural Collectivization since the Founding of the People’s Republic (Jianguo Yilai Nongye Hezuohua Shiliao Huibian). 27 % Figure 2: Maximum Excess Death Rate and Pace of De-collectivization 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 Year Higher excess dath rate Lower excess death rate Source: Same as Table 1. 28 Table 1: Definition of Variables and Data Sources Variables Degree of decollectivization Notations Mean S.D. 46.95 (44.37) (2) Weather adversity AWit 0.00 (0.46) (3) Severity of Great Leap Famine Initial irrigation condition ri max 12.53 (13.65) I i78 32.74 (15.79) fi 78 830.42 (485.17) (6) Initial distance to minimum subsistence Net grain procurement pi78 100.47 (103.50) (7) Machinery mi78 1.27 (0.77) (8) Electricity ei78 6.59 (3.00) (1) (4) (5) Yit Proxies Share of production teams with implementing the Household Responsibility System between 1978 and 1984. Based on drought, floods, gusts and hailstorms, and frost and cold. Maximum excess death rate for the period 19591961. Percentage of irrigated acreage in total arable acreage in 1978 Food availability per capita in 1978 (kg) Data sources A, B C D E F Net grain procurement per capita in 1978 (kg) F Power of Agricultural Machinery per hectare in 1978 (kw/hectare) Electricity Consumed in Rural Area per hectare in 1978 (10000 kwh/hectare) E E A. 1983-1984: Huang, Yu, and Wang, 1992. Compendium on Agricultural Collectivization since the Founding of the People’s Republic (Jianguo Yilai Nongye Hezuohua Shiliao Huibian). B. 1978 – 1982: Jae Ho Chung, 2000. Central Control and Local Discretion in China: Leadership and Implementation During Post-Mao Decollectivization. C. Ministry of Civil Affairs (1995), People’s Republic of China. Report on China’s Natural Disasters [Zhongguo Zaiqing Baogao]. D. Kung, James Kai-sing and Justin Yifu Lin, 2003. The Causes of China’s Great Leap Famine, 1959-1961. Chen, Yuyu and Lian Zhou. 2007. “The long term health and economic consequences of 1959-1961 famine in China.” E. Department of Comprehensive Statistics of National Bureau of Statistics. 1999. Comprehensive statistical data and materials on 50 years of new China. (Xin Zhongguo wu shi nian tong ji zi liao hui bian). Beijing: China Statistics Press F. Department of Planning, Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Fisheries, 1983. Materials of Agricultural Economy [Nongye Jingji Ziliao]. 29 Table 2: Temporal Variations of De-collectivization across Provinces (Baseline Results) (1) AWit ri max AWit * ri max -18.497*** (5.554) 0.015 (0.081) 0.950*** (0.280) (2) -23.696*** (6.809) (3) (4) -3.428 (3.589) -0.710 (4.061) 1.164*** (0.357) I i78 0.023 (0.177) 0.985** (0.479) AWit * ( I i78 − I 78 ) 1.294* (0.689) (5) (6) -16.462*** (4.935) 0.014 (0.080) 1.248*** (0.302) 0.028 (0.161) 1.420*** (0.425) -16.749*** (6.053) 1.305*** (0.383) 1.523** (0.587) Provincial dummies Year dummies No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Observations 126 126 120 120 120 120 R-squared 0.53 0.56 0.50 0.53 0.56 0.59 Note. The dependent variable is the share of production teams adopting household farming each year during 1978-1984; Constant term is included in the regressions but not reported. Standard errors in parentheses. * p<.1. ** p<.05. *** p<.01. 30 Table 3: Temporal Variations of De-collectivization across Provinces (Dynamic Panel Model) (1) AWit ri max AWit * ri max (2) -29.447*** (7.298) +++ 0.319*** (0.117) +++ 1.315*** (0.342) +++ -5.998 (8.813) I i78 (3) -21.022** (8.205) +++ 0.344*** (0.121) +++ 1.300*** (0.320) +++ 0.209 (0.160) 1.323** (0.666) ++ -0.513*** (0.172) +++ 0.156 (0.124) ++ The first lag of the dependent variable The second lag of the dependent variable -0.553*** (0.131) +++ 0.171* (0.098) +++ 0.210 (0.174) 1.295 (0.924) ++ -0.675*** (0.162) +++ 0.208** (0.099) ++ Observations Number of cross-sectional units 86 23 81 22 81 22 m1 m2 0.034 0.018 0.028 0.578 0.425 0.550 Hansen test (Over-identifying Restriction) 0.161 0.278 0.267 AWit * ( I i78 − I 78 ) Note. The dependent variable is the share of production teams adopting household farming each year during 1978-1984; Year dummies and constant term are included in the regressions but not reported; Two-step corrected standard errors in parentheses. * indicates degree of significance based upon two-step corrected standard errors; * significant at 10%, ** at 5%, and *** significant at 1%, respectively; and + indicates degree of significance based upon one-step robust standard errors; + significant at 10%, ++ at 5%, and +++ at 1%, respectively; m1 and m2 are test-statistics for the first-order and second-order serial correlation of the firstdifferenced residuals, asymptotically distributed N ( 0,1) ; Hansen test (P-value), which tests the validity that the instruments are exogenous, is reported. 31 Table 4: Temporal Variations of De-collectivization across Provinces—Excluding the Outliers AWit ri max AWit * ri max (1) (2) -16.509** (6.545) -0.034 (0.142) 0.880** (0.422) -22.372** (8.497) (3) -3.735 (4.043) (4) 0.343 (4.447) 1.197** (0.544) I i78 0.037 (0.171) 1.373*** (0.475) AWit * ( I i78 − I 78 ) 1.876*** (0.621) (5) -14.189** (5.869) -0.070 (0.138) 1.127** (0.450) 0.034 (0.160) 1.534*** (0.432) (6) -12.328* (6.538) 1.093** (0.519) 1.773*** (0.557) Provincial dummies Year dummies No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Observations 110 110 104 104 104 104 R-squared 0.59 0.62 0.60 0.64 0.63 0.66 Note. The dependent variable is the share of production teams adopting household farming each year during 1978-1984; Constant term is included in the regressions but not reported. Standard errors in parentheses. * p<.1. ** p<.05. *** p<.01. 32 Table 5: Temporal Variations of De-collectivization across Provinces—Controlling for the Role of Government (1) AWit ri max AWit * ri max -18.773*** (5.490) -0.014 (0.075) 0.778*** (0.267) (2) -23.970*** (6.658) AWit * ( I i78 − I 78 ) AWit * Si 1.988 (3.264) 11.137 (7.595) -8.128* (4.422) (4) -5.687 (5.232) 11.638 (8.828) 0.051 (0.168) 1.351*** (0.450) 1.309 (3.460) 30.974*** (9.800) (5) (6) -16.353*** (5.519) 31.376*** (11.401) -16.622*** (4.664) -0.019 (0.071) 0.992*** (0.276) 0.056 (0.160) 1.552*** (0.429) 2.318 (3.293) 18.367** (8.134) 0.986*** (0.333) I i78 Si (3) 1.651*** (0.626) 1.030*** (0.329) 1.689*** (0.593) 18.861** (8.875) Provincial dummies Year dummies No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Observations 126 126 120 120 120 120 R-squared 0.54 0.57 0.54 0.57 0.58 0.60 Note. The dependent variable is the share of production teams adopting household farming each year during 1978-1984; Constant term is included in the regressions but not reported. Standard errors in parentheses. * p<.1. ** p<.05. *** p<.01. 33 Table 6: Temporal Variations of De-collectivization across Provinces—Controlling for the Factors Correlated with the Great Leap Famine AWit ri max AWit * ri max I i78 AWit * ( I i78 − I 78 ) fi 78 AWit * ( fi 78 − f 78 ) (1) -15.661*** (4.551) 0.068 (0.073) 1.206*** (0.296) 0.045 (0.162) 1.514*** (0.447) 6.776 (4.171) -8.078 (13.741) (2) -16.574*** (5.982) 1.250*** (0.361) 1.521** (0.594) (3) -15.262*** (4.192) 0.040 (0.064) 0.677** (0.275) 0.147 (0.202) 0.386 (0.423) (4) -17.735*** (5.610) 0.688** (0.318) 0.189 (0.605) 0.018 (0.020) -0.147** (0.057) AWit * ( pi78 − p 78 ) 1.204*** (0.368) 1.498** (0.585) -0.162** (0.068) ui78 AWit * ( ui78 − u 78 ) No Yes 120 0.57 (6) -16.541*** (5.968) -6.634 (16.884) pi78 Provincial dummies Year dummies Observations R-squared (5) -14.316*** (4.849) 0.078 (0.078) 1.189*** (0.307) 0.047 (0.164) 1.610*** (0.502) Yes Yes 120 0.59 No Yes 120 0.59 Yes Yes 120 0.62 0.143* (0.086) -0.128 (0.195) No Yes 120 0.58 -0.270 (0.328) Yes Yes 120 0.59 Note. The dependent variable is the share of production teams adopting household farming each year during 1978-1984; Constant term is included in the regressions but not reported. Standard errors in parentheses. * p<.1. ** p<.05. *** p<.01. 34 Table 7: Temporal Variations of De-collectivization across Provinces—Controlling for the Factors Correlated with Public Goods Provision (1) AWit ri max AWit * ri max I i78 AWit * ( I i78 − I 78 ) mi78 AWit * ( mi78 − m78 ) -14.733*** (4.975) 0.069 (0.076) 1.211*** (0.314) -0.127 (0.223) 1.645*** (0.597) 5.957 (4.999) -4.224 (8.268) (2) -16.049*** (6.003) 1.259*** (0.370) 1.638** (0.698) (3) -15.374*** (4.721) 0.072 (0.082) 1.196*** (0.325) -0.033 (0.176) 1.602*** (0.518) (4) -17.465*** (6.305) 1.245*** (0.388) 1.575** (0.618) -4.658 (11.613) ei78 3.363 (2.688) -2.218 (4.335) AWit * ( ei78 − e 78 ) -3.392 (5.884) Provincial dummies Year dummies No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Observations 120 120 120 120 R-squared 0.57 0.59 0.57 0.59 Note. The dependent variable is the share of production teams adopting household farming each year during 1978-1984; Constant term is included in the regressions but not reported. Standard errors in parentheses. * p<.1. ** p<.05. *** p<.01. 35
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