THE SUPPLY OF LABOR BY INDIVIDUALS TO A CHINESE COLLECTIVE FARM - THECASE OF DAHE COMMUNE

We provide the first econometric tests of the theory of individual lab our supply in a collective farm on data at the individual level. The d ata are for members of five production teams in a commune in Hebei pro vince in 1979. Our switching regressions model does not provide eviden ce of a significant labour supply response to differences in anticipat ed earnings. We argue, however, that this failure may be indirect evid ence of 'under-differentiation' of payments, due to egalitarian ideolo gy. More importantly, we provide the first econometric evidence of thr ee significant findings about China's collective agriculture. First, o ur results imply that much of the labour supplied to the teams studied was discretionary, and not a response to coercive work norms. Second, and a corollary to the first result, is the implication that another significant portion of labour supplied was so coerced. Third, and fina lly, we find support for theoretical models which predict that labour could be oversupplied because marginal payments reflected labour's ave rage net product rather than its marginal product.