The entitlements approach developed by Amartya Sen at the end of the seventies and at the beginning of the eighties provides a microeconomic framework explaining famines in terms of food entitlements decline. This article presents an overview of the discussions and controversies dealing with...

The article aims at identifying socioeconomic factors which explain the Chinese famine of 1959-1961. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the radicalism of Great Leap Forward policies generated both a decline of agricultural output (availability problems) and the implementation of an...