| 讲座简介： | Poor people have less resources to support a big family, so extreme inequality in wealth could suppress the overall growth of population. This paper shows how the revolutionary land reform in the early 1950s in China, during which a vast amount of lands of landlords and rich peasants were confiscated and redistributed to poor peasants, affected rural population growth. Using archived data at county level, we show that counties where the distribution of land ownership had been more inequal prior to the reform had higher birth rates afterwards. This baby-boom in the 1950s has a long-run effect on the supply of industrial labor in the 1980s when the economic reform began. |
