| Description |
China's densely populated rural sector in pre-revolutionary China was comprised of low income, low productivity farm households utilizing traditional farming techniques. When Ramon H. Myers 1, Philip C. C. Huang 2, and Thomas B. Wiens 3 used neoclassical economic theory to study farming in this rural sector, two perplexing anomalies were found in the economic behavior of peasant farmers. Based on neoclassical economic assumptions, these anomalies imply that the peasant farmers were not rational in making economic decisions about farm operations. In this paper these irregularities in peasant behavior are discussed as are criticisms of the approach taken by the previous studies in applying neoclassical economic theory to China's pre-1949 agrarian economy. |
