...The causal effect of the Household Responsibility System on grain yields is statistically indistinguishable from 0.

We should reiterate what we can precisely say with satellite data. This paper has focused entirely on grain yields, which are measurable from space. Labor productivity is not. This paper’s findings are entirely consistent with the HRS increasing labor productivity, freeing up time for non-agricultural work—indeed, we are investigating these linkage effects, particularly to rural industry, in other research. Nonetheless, in people-rich, land-poor China, where rice and wheat were overwhelmingly the main caloric sources, grain yields were a central preoccupation of leadership—the procurement targets that starved millions to death during the Great Leap Forward were set in terms of unrealistic grain yields (Liu and Zhou 2022). Finding no evidence of an effect of the HRS on grain yields is in tension with the academic and popular consensus, which holds that the HRS was the major driver of agricultural productivity growth from the late 1970s to early 1980s.

If the HRS did not cause yields to grow, what did? The obvious candidate—and the only major national-level agricultural policy change during the same period—is the 1979 rise in procurement prices, where the state raised the average price for quota grain by 20% and the bonus for above-quota grain from 30% to 50% (Sicular 1988). Since these price rises did not differ by province, their effects are not captured in the border discontinuity design. Unfortunately, we are somewhat limited in what we can formally prove about the procurement price reform—AVHRR began transmitting images only in late 1978, such that we lack a pre-period for the 1979 price change.

...

At the microeconomic level, models of collective agriculture tend to emphasize free rider problems and monitoring costs, which overwhelm any of the productivity benefits of larger scale (Lin 1988). However, even under collective agriculture, there are marginal incentives to produce more, particularly if these prices are brought closer in line with free-market levels. This paper’s results touch on fundamental questions about what drives the efficiency differences between capitalist and socialist systems—is it who owns the claims on output, or is it getting prices right?

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I’ve been on a big kick recently trying to learn what I can about agricultural policy in various AES states historically. I’ve come to the conclusion that agriculture is both incredibly complicated and incredibly important to get sorted out. Like, you need to mechanize and proletarianize agricultural labor eventually. But how you get there from your starting point is the real sticky wicket. And there’s definitely no way to generalize, each country (or even region of a country) probably needs a different approach as circumstances dictate.

Without reading, do they account for this?

https://i.postimg.cc/D0k7d8wq/collectivization-chinese.png

Justin Lin Yifu is still like the most renowned and respected economist in China today lol.

First Chinese PhD alumnus from the Chicago school of economics. The Milton Friedman proteges have truly spread wide and far.