Political Conflict and Development Dynamics: Economic Legacies of the Cultural Revolution

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: University of London; King's College London; Fudan University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050723000384
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 981-1017
• 关键词: Entrepreneurship; GROWTH; CHINA

摘要

As a multi-faceted socio-political movement in twentieth-century China, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) witnessed conflict and social upheaval. This paper investigates its economic legacies, exploiting geographic variation in revolutionary intensity, measured by the number of resulting deaths. Using a newly assembled county-level panel dataset over five decades, we find worse-affected areas performed slightly better at baseline, but were slower to industrialize. This effect was large in the early 1980s before diminishing to become insignificant by 2000. Using individual-level census data, we find more-exposed cohorts are less likely to obtain higher education degrees and to work in professional and entrepreneurial occupations.