Politician’s childhood experience and government policies: Evidence from the Chinese Great Famine

We analyze the impact of a politician’s childhood experience on their policy choices. By exploiting exogenous variations in exposure to China’s Great Famine, we find that a provincial leader’s childhood experience of the famine significantly increases the share of government expenditure allocated to health care during his term. This effect is observed only for those who were aged under five during the famine and is not found among older cohorts. The impact is substantial: our back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that an increase of one standard deviation in exposure to the famine can lead to an increase of roughly 7.84 billion RMB (equivalent to about 1.19 billion US Dollars) in annual provincial health care expenditure for a province with average government spending in 2017. We provide evidence suggesting that this effect may be driven by a politician’s personal experience of negative health outcomes due to the famine. Furthermore, we observe that China’s political promotion system, which favors economic growth, incentivizes provincial leaders to counterbalance increased health care spending by reducing funding for less visible public services, particularly cultural activities. Such strategic allocations ensure the continuity of other policy areas that are more influential in their political career.