Showing papers on "Leasehold estate published in 1982"

Sharecropping and the Interlinking of Agrarian Markets

Abstract: One of the often noted features of less-developed agrarian economies is the existence of interlinkages among the land, labor, credit, and product markets. The landlord is often the supplier of credit; he frequently purchases and markets the output of the tenant farmers, and often sells raw materials and even consumption goods to his tenant farmers. How can this phenomenon be explained? What are the welfare consequences of attempts to restrict these practices, which often seem to constitute restraints on free trade? These are the questions to which this paper is addressed. A general set of arguments applicable to both competitive and noncompetitive environments are presented, to situations where all the terms of the contract are determined in an optimal way as well as to situations where many of the terms are specified institutionally. Section I examines interlinked credit and tenancy contracts; Section II examines interlinked marketing and tenancy contracts; Section III points out the possible interlinking between labor contracts and consumption goods markets; and Section IV presents the different equilibrium frameworks discussed in the paper, such as monopoly, monopsony, competition, and equilibria with surplus labor.

Tenancy, Credit and Agrarian Backwardness-Results of a Field Survey

Abstract: The findings of a survey of tenurial arrangements in Nadia district of West Bengal, reported here, reveal that tenurial arrangements were associated with backward production conditions. A typical tenant did not take up the new agricultural strategy; cost-sharing as an investment proposition was also missing from the pattern of behaviour of the landlords. A non-legalised sharecropping arrangement that assures a high share of the produce for the landowners, wielding semi-feudal authority over the tenants in a near stagnant agrarian economy, is the typical reality with respect to the observed house- holds. No neat model on the lines of differential risk aversion, or varying bargaining power of individual lessors and lessees, seems to he applicable to such an economy.

Tenancy and landlessness in thailand: how severe a problem?

Abstract: IN THE 1950s and early 1960s most accounts of rural Thailand portrayed an economically secure and politically passive peasantry. In 1962 David Wilson could write that "severe pressure of population on the land and the related problems of peasant indebtedness, landlord-tenant conflict, and impoverishment of the rural population have occurred rarely in Thailand."' Twenty years later most accounts of rural Thailand suggest that these problems are no longer rare but are widespread and becoming increasingly severe. Tenancy and landlessness, in particular, have become major sources of concern and the reasons are not difficult to discover. Tenancy is widely believed to be the source of considerable hardship for peasants and a major cause of protest and revolution, at least in other peasant societies. For example, Roy L. Prosterman suggests that "all of the great civil conflicts that unrolled first in Mexico, and later in Russia, China, and Vietnam ... grew largely out of peasant grievances-especially the fundamental grievances associated with land tenure."2 Donald Zagoria concurs "that one particular type of rural class structure-family-size tenancy in conditions of heavy pressure on the land-is particularly conducive to rural instability."3 Others, however, argue that tenancy has been exaggerated as a cause of violence and revolution. Hofheinz found "a negative relationship between areas of unequal land distribution and areas where the Communist movement blossomed" in China, and no clear relationship between tenancy and Communist influence.4 Similarly, both Suzanne Pepper and Mark Selden point out that the areas of north China where the Chinese Communist Party built up major bases of support were not a part of China with particularly high levels of tenancy.5 Finally, Bruce Russett

Agricultural Tenancy in the Nineteenth–Century Middle West: The Historiographical Debate

Abstract: The history of agricultural tenancy has attracted consider able attention and provoked wide disagreement among scholars. Some have seen tenancy as the unfortunate but en tirely natural result of the retreat of the American frontier and the disappearance of unoccupied, arable land. Others have claimed that a misguided and ineptly administered federal land policy enabled evil moneyed interests to impose tenancy upon helpless farmers. Still others have argued that the institution was a rational and socially desirable adjustment to the condi tions of a maturing agricultural economy. Not only was ten ancy an unfortunate or cruel condition for poor farmers, accord ing to its critics, it was also a situation from which few were able to extricate themselves. Those, on the other hand, who take a kinder view of the institution have held that it often served as a rung on an agricultural ladder leading to farm ownership. Some have asserted that the terms of rental agree ments were arbitrarily dictated by landlords, while others have insisted that they were understandable and salutary responses to prevailing economic circumstances. Finally, the debate has encompassed the implications of tenancy for the economy as a whole. If some scholars have seen the institution as inherently inefficient and detrimental to economic growth, others have claimed that renters were as productive as their landowner counterparts and that tenancy in fact enhanced growth. Although scholars have been concerned with tenancy throughout the United States, they have focused primarily on

Tenancy and Asset-Holding in Late Eighteenth-Century Washington County, Pennsylvania

Abstract: Recent studies of early American rural life have turned scholars' attention to the problem of landholding and tenancy in the eighteenth century. In spite of the existence of relatively few useful records, especially outside New England, historians have begun to draw a sketch of landlords and tenants in early America. Records of tenancy in Pennsylvania are quite rare, but fortunately some evidence concerning it has survived for Washington County in the late eighteenth century. Close scrutiny of these records demonstrates that although many of the inhabitants of various Washington County townships were landless in the late eighteenth century, these persons without land — many of them tenants — possessed modest amounts of other assets and accordingly should not be considered an oppressed class permanently submerged in degraded poverty. Itis the thesis of this article that tenants and landless persons in Washington County possessed enough resources to maintain an adequate, if frugal, style of

The residential mobility process in belfast: a consideration of public sector tenancy allocations

Abstract: To explain patterns of public sector tenancy allocations in Belfast, an account is given of the Housing Selection Scheme adopted by the single housing authority in the province, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive Implicit in the scheme is the concept of housing power, ie the differential ability of households to compete for the tenancies available Using a sample of allocations in the Belfast Urban Area between 1977 and 1978, the spatial implications of the Housing Selection Scheme are examined, and an attempt is made to draw together the main findings with evidence from other residential mobility research in Belfast, notably on the role of ethnicity in the housing relocation process

The Effects of Tenancy and Risk on Cropping Patterns: A Mathematical Programming Analysis

Abstract: Most analyses of allocatlve efficiency under dJfferent forms of agnculturaJ tenure;hare tenancy, fixed cash tenancy, and owner cultlvatJon-employ single product models of production These models show that nsk shanng encourages share tenants to produce as much as or more than equally nsk·averse owner-operators and cash tenants However, when ~sk and nsk aversIOn are Introduced mto multiproduct linear programming models, relative allocabve efficiency under share tenancy may declme The result depends on the relatIve productJon costs and the relative nsk premiums of the different products