Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28200324%2917%3A1%3C199%3ARWHTTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2The Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently published by American Economic Association.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/aea.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgThu Jun 21 12:47:44 2007

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/pdf/doi/10.1257/089533003321165010

Retrospectives: Whatever Happened to the Cambridge Capital Theory Controversies?

There are two problems, both universal, that entrepreneurs in any economy must contend with. Firstly, an agent generally has access only to a limited amount of working capital. Secondly, workers hired by an agent are subject to moral hazard, and this necessitates their supervision. This paper models, for an agrarian economy, the constraints imposed on entrepreneurs' activities by these two problems and endogenously determines the various organisational forms of production, as well as the allocation of resources that will obtain. With a simple model we endeavour to explain a diverse set of empirical observations pertaining to the less developed countries in terms of the general processes that determine the distribution of income among the various agents and the hierarchical relationships that develop among them. Agricultural production typically involves a period of several months between the time the inputs are purchased and the time the output is marketed. Access to working capital and hence to the credit market thus plays an important role in a farmer's production decisions; the distribution of access to credit, in turn, tends to be an important determinant of income distribution. In poor agrarian economies, credit is invariably rationed according to the ability to offer collateral.' The amount of working capital a farmer can mobilise, therefore, depends on the amount of land he owns, which is often a good proxy for his overall wealth and, thus, his ability to offer collateral. Further, since hired hands have a propensity to shirk, they need to be supervised, and, therefore, the

/pdf/access-to-capital-and-agrarian-production-organisation-3ti5xbaygy.pdf

Access to capital and agrarian production organisation

The State of Family Farms in the World

Redistributive land reforms have begun to attract the attention of scholars and policy makers once again. In this paper, we review old arguments and bring them up-to-date in the light of recent research. We begin with the case in favour of redistributive reforms focusing on fragmented factor markets and systems of labour control, of which concentration of land ownership is but one aspect. We then examine land reform in practice, focusing on distinct regional features and outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the transition economies of the former Soviet bloc and, as examples of success, East Asia (including China and Vietnam). Next we discuss the macroeconomic context and the two-way direction of causality between a redistribution of productive assets and the overall performance of the economy. We underline the importance of weakening the system of labour control, eliminating landlord bias and correcting urban bias. Finally, we argue that a prominent feature of all successful land reforms has been a high degree of land confiscation; full compensation and various types of ‘market friendly’ land reform are unlikely to be successful.

/pdf/poverty-and-the-distribution-of-land-4wdg2eadin.pdf

Poverty and the Distribution of Land

On price risk and the inverse farm size-productivity relationship

The Political Economy of Agrarian Change.

This is an attempt to investigate the reasons for the muted formation and development of capitalist relations in Indian agriculture, even while commercialisation in output markets has advanced considerably. Analysing the qualitatively differing character of exchange involvement, resting on the class basis of a differentiated peasantry, we have noted the differential dynamics that commercialisation entails for different classes and its overall, macroeconomic consequences. We argue that the desperate dependence on land as the basis for survival, with no alternative permanent means of livelihood, perpetuates the perverse exchange relations and retards productive accumulation. Most employment‐generating schemes sponsored by the state turn out to be ameliorative, providing only an intermittent supplementary source of income. This, along with the weak pull of a tardy industrial growth, only stabilises the petty‐holders. It is the preponderance or otherwise of petty‐holders, who are in no position to undertake p...

Krishna Bharadwaj

Papers

The Political Economy of Agrarian Change.

A view on commercialisation in Indian agriculture and the development of capitalism

Production Conditions in Indian Agriculture.

Production conditions in Indian agriculture : a study based on farm management surveys

Classical Political Economy and Rise to Dominance of Supply and Demand Theories