IESET.
Policies·china_household_responsibility_1978

China Household Responsibility System 1978

CHN·1978 2012candidate
movesproduct market competitiontrade opennessproperty rightssectoral subsidy

What the policy did

Bottom-up rural decollectivisation that began informally in 1978 in Xiaogang village, Anhui, and was endorsed and generalised by the 1982 Central Committee Document No. 1. The household responsibility system replaced commune-based collective production with long-term household contracts over land, requiring delivery of a fixed quota to the state at procurement prices and allowing households to retain residual output for sale on rural markets. By 1984, ~98% of farm households operated under the system; agricultural output, productivity, and rural incomes rose sharply through the early 1980s.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended
product market competition
regulatory.product_market_competition
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
increased · weak
more competition-friendly (lower entry barriers)
Above-quota output sold on rural markets at unregulated prices reintroduced competitive farm-gate price signals.
trade openness
regulatory.trade_openness
Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
increased · weak
more open trade
Surplus rural labour and food output enabled the parallel coastal export-zone strategy of the early reform period.
property rights
institutional.property_rights
Security of private property rights — formal recognition, expropriation risk, titling systems.
increased · weak
stronger property rights
Long-term household contracts (initially 15y, later 30y) created de facto use rights and residual claimancy without formal title.
sectoral subsidy
fiscal.sectoral_subsidy
Targeted industrial and sectoral subsidies (renewable energy, chip manufacturing, agriculture, green hydrogen, etc).
increased · weak
expanded sectoral subsidies
1979 procurement-price increase (~20%) and reduced grain quotas raised the implicit fiscal transfer to the rural sector.

Enacted by

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free trade, and minimal capital controls — and by 2007 had recovered to Soviet-era GDP per capita levels and substantially exceeded them, while Belarusian and Ukrainian peers had not recovered comparably.
estonia_market_reform_post_soviet_growth_1991_2007inferred
viaregulatory.trade_opennessregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.property_rights
PARTIAL — recovery threshold pass=True (year_recovered=1998, 2007 vs 1991 = 70.53282727739165); Baltic−CIS gap pass=False (gap=5.1509956229348575)
partial
Across a broad panel of economies 1980-2020, market reforms (privatisation, trade liberalisation, and price decontrol) produce durable gains in real GDP per capita growth only when rule-of-law scores exceed a minimum threshold (WGI Rule of Law > -0.5, approximately the 40th percentile of the global distribution).
rule_of_law_market_reform_complementarityinferred
viaregulatory.product_market_competitionregulatory.trade_opennessinstitutional.property_rights
REFUTED — coef=-0.1483 (sign opposite claim +), p=0.00481
refuted
Starting from comparable 1945 post-war conditions — same ethnicity, language, pre-war German institutional and industrial inheritance, and with the GDR inheriting a larger share of pre-war industrial capital in Saxony and Thuringia — the Federal Republic's Soziale Marktwirtschaft (Ordoliberal market economy with welfare state) versus the German Democratic Republic's planned economy with administered prices, state-enterprise production, and soft budget constraints produced by 1989 a canonical divergence that pattern-matches >=7 of 10 pre-registered extreme-outcome metrics, each drawn from a different publisher or methodology family.
west_east_germany_economic_system_divergence_1950_1989inferred
viainstitutional.property_rightsregulatory.product_market_competitionregulatory.trade_openness
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']
run pending
The Soviet central-planning system, having already exhibited TFP stagnation 1970-1989, underwent a canonical institutional and economic collapse 1989-1998 as plan-enforcement was withdrawn without functioning market institutions in place.
soviet_union_central_planning_gdp_collapse_1989_1991inferred
viaregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.property_rights
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']
run pending
Canada’s long-run prosperity after the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (1988) and NAFTA (1994) is more associated with market openness than with national industrial-policy initiatives.
canada_market_liberalisation_vs_state_industry_1988_2024inferred
viaregulatory.trade_opennessregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.property_rightsfiscal.sectoral_subsidy
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — treatment 'canada_post_1988' has no within-country variation under country fixed effects
run pending
Vietnam's post-Doi Moi economic growth (1986-2020) is more strongly associated with private-sector enterprise entry, trade openness, and market-oriented reforms than with state-owned-enterprise (SOE) expansion or continued state direction.
vietnam_doi_moi_private_sector_growth_shareinferred
viaregulatory.trade_opennessinstitutional.property_rightsregulatory.product_market_competitionfiscal.sectoral_subsidy
SUPPORTED — coef=+0.001558 (sign matches claim +), p=0.0749
supported
Australia’s long expansion after the Hawke-Keating reforms (1983–1996) — including tariff cuts, financial deregulation, competition-policy introduction, and fiscal consolidation — is better predicted by market liberalisation than by sector-specific state direction.
australia_hawke_keating_reform_long_runinferred
viaregulatory.trade_opennessregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.property_rights
PARTIAL — coef=-0.03935, p=0.076 (above α=0.05); direction inconclusive
partial
In a panel of middle-income countries 1990-2020, export complexity (Hausmann-Hidalgo Economic Complexity Index) rises more following reforms that improve foreign market access and reduce domestic entry barriers than following expansions of subsidy-only industrial policy.
export_complexity_market_access_vs_subsidyinferred
viaregulatory.trade_opennessfiscal.sectoral_subsidyregulatory.product_market_competitioninstitutional.property_rights
PARTIAL — coef=+4.68e-14, p=0.393; effect magnitude effectively zero
partial

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.