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Land Value Tax Resources

Debate with yourself - did Japan's economic miracle originate from land reform, or was it merely stymied by lack of access to credit as a result of land reform? Was empirical data used? Comparisons before and after?

  • Consider a quote from this study backed by at least some empirical data and analysis:

"Empirical studies of the impact of land reform are rare since reliable estimation requires data from the pre- and postreform periods. In India there are numerous case studies of land reform (reviewed below), but few attempts to look at the overall picture. Discussion of the theoretical impact of land reform has been dominated by the frequently found inverse farm size-productivity relationship, whence small farmers are supposed to achieve higher yields (see Binswanger et al. [1995]). This suggests that finding means of evening the distribution of landholding should lead to productivity gains in addition to redistributive benefits. However, land reforms in India are rarely of a form that could directly exploit this possibility. Moreover, careful analyses, such as Banerjee and Ghatak [1997] show that the theoretical effects on productivity are inherently ambiguous when assessing the impact of tenancy reforms that allow tenants greater security. Our main finding is that there is a robust link between land reform and poverty reduction. Closer scrutiny reveals that, in an Indian context, this is due primarily to land reforms that change the terms of land contracts rather than actually redistributing land. Consistent with the antipoverty impact, we find that land reform has raised agricultural wages. The impact of land reform on growth also depends upon the type of land reform. Overall, there is some evidence that the gain in poverty reduction did come at the expense of lower income per capita. We show that all of these results are consistent with a simple model of agricultural contracting." Source: Land Reform, Poverty Reduction, and Growth: Evidence from India 
Author(s): Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess
Source: The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 115, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 389-430 Published by: Oxford University Press
 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2586998