Most work on the relationship between farm size and productivity strongly suggests that farms that rely mostly on family labor are more productive than large farms operated primarily by hired labor. This study began as an inquiry into how rental and sales markets for agricultural land in the developing world affect efficiency and equity. What emerged was the clear sense that great variations in land relations around the world and over time cannot be understood in the common paradigm of property rights and competitive markets. Under that paradigm, land scarcity leads to better definition of rights, which are then traded in sales and rental markets accessible equally to all players. The outcome should be the allocation of land to the most efficient uses and users, yet this rarely happens. Instead, land rights and ownership tend to grow out of power relationships. Landowning groups have used coercion and distortions in land, labor, credit, and commodity markets to extract economic rents from the land, from peasants and workers, and most recently from urban consumer groups or taxpayers. Such rent-seeking activities reduce the efficiency of resource use, retard growth, and increase the poverty of the rural population. The authors examine how these power relations emerged and what legal means enabled relatively few landowners to accumulate and hold on to large landholdings. The authors discuss the successes and failures of reform in market and socialist economies, and the perversions of reforms in both systems, manifested in large commercial farms and collectives. They survey the history of land relations and the legacies that history leaves. They discuss the three analytical controversies surrounding economies of scale, and the efficiency of the land sales and land rental market. They discuss the main policy issues and implications of various distortions and successful and unsuccessful reforms in the developing world, including land registration and titling, land taxation, regulations restricting land sales and rentals, fragmentation and consolidation of land, redistributive land reform, and decollectivization. In an epilogue on methodology, the authors examine how various strands of economic theory have contributed, or failed to contribute, to the explanation of variations in policies, distortions, and land relations over space and time.

Power, distortions, revolt, and reform in agricultural land relations

Publisher Summary This chapter inquires into the efficiency and equity consequences of rental and sales markets for agricultural land in the developing world Most of the work on the relationship between farm size and productivity strongly suggests that farms that rely mostly on family labor have higher productivity levels than large farms operated primarily with hired labor An examination of the historical evolution of land rights shows the reason for the deviations: rights over land and the concentration of ownership observed in most developing countries at the end of World War II are outgrowths of power relationships The chapter describes the variety of land relations and their consequences for the efficiency of agricultural production The chapter also we examines how these power relations emerged and what legal means enabled relatively few landowners to accumulate and hold on to large landholdings The methodological epilogue examines how various strands of economic theory have contributed, or failed to contribute, to the explanation of variations in policies, distortions and land relations over space and time

Chapter 42 Power, distortions, revolt and reform in agricultural land relations

The performance of three approaches to predict the timing and quantity of LDC debt rescheduling is examined: the balance sheet approach, the traditional macro approach and the structural approach. Results show that the balance sheet approach performs better.

Three approaches to predict the timing and quantity of LDC debt rescheduling

Wages and Labour Conditions in East Asia A Review of Case-study Evidence

This paper uses a long panel of Brazilian workers from RAIS (a administrative database of Labor Ministry of Brazil) to investigate what happens to the region, industry and occupation wage differentials, after we control for the unobservable characteristics of workers that are fixed over time. Since a substantial share of workers changed region, industry and/or occupation in the sample period, it is possible to examine to what extent these differentials occur due to the concentration of high skill individuals in some states/sector/occupations. The results show that the magnitude of the differentials drops by up to 20 times, and their significance is considerably reduced, after we take into account the workers’ fixed effects. As a result, there is a reorientation of wage differentials among regions and industries. Additionally, the overall variability drops by up to eight times, showing the importance of the non-observed individual heterogeneity by explaining about 70%, 83% and 88% of the inter-state, inter-industry and inter-occupation wage differentials, respectively.

/pdf/inter-regional-and-inter-industry-wage-differentials-with-4l2v7vua4z.pdf

Frances Stewart

Papers

Work, Income and Inequality