Reassessing China’s Rural Reforms: The View from Outer Space

We study one of the central reforms in China’s economic miracle, the Household Responsibility System (HRS), which decollectivized agriculture starting in 1978. The HRS is commonly seen as having significantly boosted agricultural productivity—but this conclusion rests on unreliable official data. We use historical satellite imagery to generate new measurements of grain yield, independent of official Chinese statistics. Using two separate empirical designs that exploit the staggered rollout of the HRS across provinces and counties, we find no causal evidence that areas that adopted the HRS sooner experienced faster grain yield growth. These results challenge our conventional understanding of decollectivization, land reform, and the origins of the Chinese miracle.

That is a new paper by Joel Ferguson and Oliver Kim, with Kim being on the job market from Berkeley this year.  Here is Kim’s thread on Twitter.  Intriguing results, which have won praise from Pseudoerasmus…

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