Famines and Socialism
What is the historical association between state ownership or control of the economy and famine morality? Using the historical Our World in Data of Famines, we examine this using V-Dem’s State Ownership of Economy measure. It is important to adjust for the size of the population, so I also gathered population estimates. Here is the scatterplot with the line of best fit with state ownership of the economy of 0 representing complete state ownership or control and 4 representing complete private ownership of control:
But, it is also telling to examine the total famine deaths between socialism (state ownership of the economy of 0-1) and capitalism (3-4):
