{"title":"Political Conflict and Development Dynamics: Economic Legacies of the Cultural Revolution","authors":"Liang Bai, Lingwei Wu","doi":"10.1017/s0022050723000384","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":51435,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Economic History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022050723000384","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Economic History is devoted to the multidisciplinary study of history and economics, and is of interest not only to economic historians but to social and demographic historians, as well as economists in general. The journal has broad coverage, in terms of both methodology and geographic scope. Topics covered include money and banking, trade, manufacturing, technology, transportation, industrial organisation, labour, agriculture, servitude, demography, education, economic growth, and the role of government and regulation. In addition, an extensive book review section keeps readers informed about the latest work in economic history and related fields.