An Analysis on the Inverse Relationship between Yield and Farm Size in Rural China in the 1930s

Abstract

In order to test the classical hypothesis whether an inverse relationship between land productivity and cultivated area is observed in developing countries, we conducted the Box–Cox transformation test for functional forms on the five main crops of Buck’s crop yield survey. The result of the test shows that the relationship between land productivity and cultivated areas of wheat and barley would be linear or slightly negative, while those of rice, rapeseed, and seed cotton appear to be slightly positive. Therefore, we can tentatively conclude that the relationship between cultivated area and land productivity was not the same for each crop: differences in labor intensity and the level of commercialization of each crop were strongly related to the (non)existence of an inverse relationship.