In Defence of Neo-Classical Neo-Populism

This paper is a response to the discussion in the special issue of this Journal on Redistributive Land Reform Today (Vol. 4, Nos. 1 and 2). We begin by attempting to clarify the methodological debate, differentiating our approach, which our critics call neo-classical neo-populism, from mainstream neo-classical economics and historical materialism. We then distinguish between land tenure reforms and redistributive land reforms, and argue that it is the latter that really matter. Next, we address the issue of the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity. Fourth, we discuss cases in which systems of labour control are used to transform the peasantry into a landless rural proletariat and challenge the view that systems of labour control can usefully be reduced to a problem of transaction costs. We end with discussions of reform in the transition economies, China and Bangladesh, where we defend the view that it is the distribution of landownership rather than operational holdings that largely determines the extent of poverty.     

Land tenure and management reforms in East and Southern Africa – the case of Botswana

Since attainment of independence, almost every country in East and Southern Africa has introduced some kind of land reform aimed at reconciling indigenous land tenure practices and those introduced by colonial regimes. The reforms have centred on modification of tenurial rules on access, ownership, administration and transfer of land rights coupled with land redistribution and/or restitution in some countries. With the exception of a few countries, such as Botswana, land reforms have largely remained on statute books with little to show on the ground. The paper gives an overview of land reforms in East and Southern Africa, taking Botswana as a case study. It notes that although Botswana has largely been successful in implementing land reforms, it is currently experiencing land tenure problems, especially in peri-urban settlements and inner city low-income areas, despite government's enhanced control over local land administrative structures. The paper ends with suggestions on how to contain the current problems.     

Property rights reform to support China’s rural ‐ urban integration: household‐level evidence from the Chengdu experiment

In 2008, as part of a national experiment, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. Results from a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the National Statistics Bureau's regular household survey suggest that the reforms increased consumption and income, in particular for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation. Local labour supply increased with the young shifting towards agriculture and the old towards off‐farm employment. The reforms also contributed to higher agricultural yields and profits through three channels, namely: (i) greater rental market activity that transferred land to more productive producers; (ii) substitution of purchased inputs for labour; and (iii) a shift out of grains towards vegetables, corn, and oilseeds all of which offer higher levels of profitability. All of these findings are consistent with the notion that, without reforms, imperfections in factor markets undermined investment and functioning of land and labour markets, preventing high‐value peri‐urban land from being used most effectively and reducing job creation.     

Impacts of Low-Cost Land Certification on Investment and Productivity

New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries. This article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low-cost land certification implemented in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, using a unique household and farm-plot-level panel data set, with data from before and up to eight years after the reform. Alternative econometric methods were used to test and control for endogeneity of certification and for unobserved household heterogeneity. Significant positive impacts were found, including effects on the maintenance of soil conservation structures, investment in trees, and land productivity.     

From creating to confronting racial hierarchies: The evolving role of the US state in land policy

From systemically dispossessing Indigenous people of their territory for Euro-American settlement to routinely denying African American farmers operating loans in the 20th century, the US government's complicity in creating racial hierarchies in terms of land access is well documented. Less understood is how land policies oriented towards racial equity, namely, the Justice for Black Farmers Act (JBFA), and other initiatives that deal with land access as well as addressing racism more broadly, emerged during recent decades. In this article, we argue that such initiatives resulted from Black-led organizations and other farmer advocacy allies responding to neoliberal policy reforms. Concretely, even as these reforms destabilized farm economies, they also led to a decentralization of agricultural policy administration, which, in turn, created opportunities for community-based organizations to influence land governance. We make this argument after presenting a three-part periodization of the evolution of US land policy, starting with the emergence of racial hierarchies, then the period of partial reforms that began during the New Deal and, finally, the era of neoliberal reform.     

The Quest to Bring Land under Social and Political Control: Land Reform Struggles of the Past and Present in Ecuador

Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, the paper characterizes these struggles as the attempt to increase the social and political control of land in the face of mounting commodification. The movement started in the 1960s and remains evident in Ecuador today. Exploring land reform in Ecuador from this theoretical perspective provides new insight into land struggles in the country and contributes to debates over land reforms of the past and present elsewhere in the Global South.     

两岸土地改革60年回顾、比较及启示

研究目的:比较分析两岸土地改革的历程和经验,增进对土地改革的理解和启示。研究方法:文献资料法和比较分析法。研究结果:(1)1949年以来,大陆历经5阶段、台湾历经3阶段的土地改革;(2)两岸土地改革动力、阻力、本质、演进路径等相同;(3)两岸土地改革的思想渊源、改革方式、衍生问题等有所不同。研究结论:(1)两岸土地改革积累了宝贵经验,可供相互参考和借鉴;(2)土地改革要与社会经济发展阶段相适应;(3)土地改革要协调各方利益,提供正确激励。     

Breaking with the past? The politics of land restitution and the limits to restitutive justice in Myanmar

Land reforms, which include restitution and redistribution of land, often accompany political transitions, as new regimes attempt to break with the past by establishing new modes of governance. The political transition that began in Myanmar in 2011 provides one such example. In Myanmar’s ‘rice bowl’, the Ayeyarwady Delta, widespread land confiscations during the 1990s and 2000s facilitated the establishment of large fish farms, often at the expense of smallholder cultivators who worked agricultural lands without formal use rights. Reforms initiated in 2011 appeared to offer the prospect of restitutive land justice for rural households affected by land confiscation, but this promise has been slow to materialize. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Delta, this paper analyzes the narratives and strategies deployed by different groups of state and societal actors advocating for and against land restitution, focusing on the competing uses of two concepts: legality and legitimacy. In doing so, we explore how state-society relations in Myanmar have been reworked through these processes of contestation, and examine possibilities for, and limits to, progressive land reform during political transition.     

Rural Banking and Landless Labour Households: Institutional Reform and Rural Credit Markets in India

Financial liberalization is a key component of programmes of orthodox structural adjustment. Financial reforms include, among other things, the removal of controls on interest rates and the abolition of programmes of directed credit. Here the effect of financial sector reform on rural banking and rural credit transactions in India is examined, with particular reference to landless labour households. First, the trends in selected indicators of rural banking at the national level over the last 30 years are reviewed. Secondly, longitudinal data for a village in Tamil Nadu are used to examine changes in patterns of indebtedness and credit transactions among landless labour households. It is argued that the exploitation of landless labour households in the credit market has intensified with the introduction of financial reforms. Lastly, the policy envisaged as an alternative to the formal credit sector in the countryside – the establishment of micro–credit projects – is examined critically.     

Four decades of China’s agricultural extension reform and its impact on agents’ time allocation

The Chinese Government has initiated a series of agricultural reforms since the 1970s to encourage agents to provide more services to farmers. In 2006, a new round of agricultural reforms was extended nationwide; however, the effectiveness of these reforms has not been examined. Based on a comparison of survey data sets before and after the reforms, we found that overall they significantly increased the time agents spend on agricultural extension services, although their effectiveness differs among three major components of the reforms. While the financial assurance reform had little impact on agents’ time allocation, the administrative reform actually reduced the time allocation to agricultural extension. However, we found strong evidence that the ‘three rights’ management reform (comprising the rights of personnel, financial and asset management) successfully increased agents’ time allocation to agricultural extension services. We also found that institutional incentives and the Government’s investment did not increase the time agents spent on agricultural extension. The lack of incentives is a problem that needs to be addressed in future reforms. We found that professional agents spent more time providing extension services than their non‐professional counterparts. We suggest that local Governments should avoid recruiting non‐professional agents into agricultural extension stations.     

The Cry for Land: Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan

Agrarian reform in Uzbekistan has been informed by contradictory objectives and priorities. Legislation has oscillated between measures to increase private access to land, in line with populist pressures and the structural reform agenda of international agencies, and counter–measures to tighten and restrict such access in response to the Government imperative of retaining control over the production and export earnings of cotton. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the provinces of Andijan and Khorezm in 2000–1, this article analyses the role of gendered divisions of labour in the maintenance of a commercial cotton sector alongside a smallholder economy that has become the mainstay of rural livelihoods since the post–Soviet collapse of public sector employment and wages. It also discusses the outcomes of different types of farm restructuring and highlights the gender differentiated outcomes of a reform process that forces a growing number of women out of the recorded labour force into casual, unremunerated and informal work.     

Securing Women's Interests within Land Tenure Reforms: Recent Debates in Tanzania

This article is an account of the debates around the recent land tenure reforms in Tanzania. It focuses on the discourses of Government officials, academic researchers and NGO activists on the implications of the reforms for women's interests in land and the most fruitful approaches to the issues of discriminatory customary law rules and male–dominated land management and adjudication institutions at national and village levels. The article argues that from being marginal to the debates, women's interests became one of the most contentious issues, showing up divisions within NGO ranks and generating accusations of State co–optation and class bias. It illustrates the implications of the recent positive reappraisal of African customary laws and local–level land management institutions for a specific national context, that of Tanzania.     

Land tenure and land reform: past and present

This article looks at land reform in history and compares it to the present. The primary concern is the relationship between land tenure and economic development, and land reform and the distribution of income, wealth and power. The main finding—that dispersed ownership and management correlate with economic development—is unsurprising. But it is more difficult to assess how conditions which are conducive to maximal production come about, or how a society shifts from concentrated power over land and labour to a dispersed tenure system.     

Understanding Landscape Stewardship – Lessons to be Learned from Public Service Economics

We argue that public service economics provides a new perspective on landscape stewardship by explaining it as human‐to‐human transfer of partial property rights. These mutually linked exchanges involve rights to use, to access, or to control and allocate land, labour, skills or information. From the perspective of public service economics, we identify the actors involved in landscape stewardship and distinguish entrepreneurial strategies for service provision based on resource orientation, user orientation or competiveness orientation. The difficulties in evaluating the quality of services in general and landscape stewardship in particular result in substantial uncertainty. Three types of contracts that cope differently with this uncertainty can be distinguished: contracts focusing on the technical process, on the intended outcome or on the choice of suppliers based on trust and features of their performance potential. We conclude that a service economics perspective can add to the understanding of landscape stewardship. Due to the fact that ‘public service’ is already a well‐known and broadly acknowledged concept in society, public service economics could possibly provide more rapid progress towards a better co‐ordination of supply and demand for landscape qualities than other more novel concepts.     

Labour,nature, and exploitation: Social metabolism and inequality in a farming community in mid‐19th century Catalonia

Exploiting the labour of other people has historically been one of the main strategies to tackle the biophysical tension that always exists between the satisfaction of human needs and the labour required to fulfil them. Based on the insights of ecological, feminist, and Marxist economics, we disentangle the exploitation of the labour of women and labouring poor through a novel methodology that integrates energy, material, time, and cash balances. We apply it to the sociometabolic flows between household units endowed with different land and livestock resources in a traditional rural community in Catalonia (Spain) in the mid‐19th century. The results show that land and livestock hoarding led to a process of accumulation through dispossession that increased the exploitative relationships through the labour market, which in turn relied on the patriarchal division of labour between men and women at home. Our estimates of energy labour surplus reveal that male wages represented 88% of the equivalent consumption basket that would have been obtained by carrying out the same amount of labour on land of one's own. However, in the case of female wages, the percentage was 54%. This shows that wage labour incorporated a significant amount of unpaid domestic family labour.     

中国农村土地要素市场化改革探源

基于政府与市场关系,运用产权理论与新结构经济学理论,探讨农村土地要素市场化的政策史流变、经济学意涵和制度性创新。研究表明,第一,改革开放以来市场在土地资源配置中的作用经历了由辅助性到基础性再到决定性的历史转变,农村土地要素市场化也经历了改革探索期、改革发展期与改革深化期。第二,土地要素市场化的经济学本质是土地转让权的赋予,赋予农户充分、完整且有保障的土地转让权具有理论必要性和现实必然性。第三,未来的农村土地要素市场化改革,一方面要培育有效市场,以土地产权制度改革为主线,做好产权界定、产权配置和产权保护工作;另一方面要建设有为政府,以土地管理制度改革为依托,做好数量管控、用途管制和市场监管工作。     

Revisiting the World Bank's land law reform agenda in Africa: The promise and perils of customary practices

This paper revisits the World Bank's land law reform agenda in Africa by focusing on two central issues: (1) land law reform as a tool for resolving land conflicts, and (2) the role of land law reform in addressing gender inequalities. While the Bank's recent land report provides insights for improving land governance in Africa, it fails to acknowledge the exploitative and contentious politics that often characterize customary land tenure systems, and the local power dynamics that undermine the ability of marginalized groups to secure land rights. Using insights from recent fieldwork, the paper analyses the links between land law reform and conflict in Ghana, and the gendered dynamics of reforming land governance in Tanzania. These “crucial cases” illustrate how land law reform can provoke conflicts over land and threaten the rights of vulnerable populations (e.g. migrants and women) when customary practices are uncritically endorsed as a means of improving land governance. As such, the paper concludes with a series of recommendations on how to navigate the promise and perils of customary practices in the governance of land.     

Homestead management in China from the “separation of two rights” to the “separation of three rights”: Visualization and analysis of hot topics and trends by mapping knowledge domains of academic papers in China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI)

Rural to urban migration under China’s rapid urbanization has created inefficient use of rural homestead land. To address these issues, there is increasing interest in rural homestead system reform in China. Although several reforms have been implemented in pilot areas, reviews of the related accumulated literature are rare. The objectives of this study are the following: (i) to discuss the research transition from the “separation of two rights” to the “separation of three rights” in homestead management and (ii) draw conclusions on current research conditions, hot topics, and trends. This study provides a reference for further and deeper rural homestead system reform in China and regions worldwide. We collected and sorted 640 research papers on the topic of the separation of three rights in homestead (hereinafter referred to as STRH) or the homestead land use rights from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and used CiteSpace and VOSviewer to visualize and map knowledge domains. The results show that: (1) From the study of the homestead land use rights to the study of the STRH, there is pronounced synergy between national policies and the number of published papers. The STRH has become a popular research field since 2018. (2) Most researchers are experts and scholars engaged in the study of agricultural economics, civil and commercial law, administrative law, or local legal systems. (3) Current and future studies on the STRH are and will be conducted in terms of the definition of concepts and connotations, confirmation of rights and registration, implementation paths, rural homestead system reform, rural revitalization strategy, reform challenges and countermeasures, risk control, and overall planning. (4) The studies on the STRH have integrity, and show characteristics of inheritance between it and studies on the homestead land use rights. (5) Studies on typical cases for the STRH should be conducted in combination with the latest strategic requirements such as rural land system reform, rural revitalization strategy, and integrated urban and rural development.     

2021年土地科学研究重点进展评述及2022年展望 ——土地经济分报告

研究目的：梳理并比较2021年国内外土地经济领域的研究进展和研究重点,展望未来研究方向。研究方法：文献分析法。研究结果：2021年,国内研究集中于城市土地利用效率、城市土地供给、农地流转机制建设、土地价格的空间分布、土地要素市场化、产权安全效应、产权制度创新、土地征收补偿以及宅基地制度改革等问题;国外研究重点关注城市土地价格的影响因素、土地市场与农业发展、土地市场参与主体与土地利用效率、产权安全与农业生产效率、土地制度改革的减贫效应等。研究结论：土地经济研究的深度和广度得到了拓展,土地经济研究需要进一步结合中国国情,着力探索理论创新,为形成有中国特色的土地经济理论、更好地为新时代土地制度改革服务而努力。2022年《中国土地科学》将重点关注土地经济基础理论探索、土地市场波动的理论与实证研究、土地要素市场化机制设计、土地制度改革配套政策、确权登记颁证进展与绩效评估、重要改革试点的跟踪与评价等。     

Understanding the variation in estimates of off-farm labour supply elasticities: A meta-analysis

The design of rural development policies and government programmes in support of farm operations and farm households relies on precise estimates of off-farm labour supply elasticities. However, the wide variation in estimates dilutes their power to predict the magnitude of these targeted interventions. We perform a meta-analysis of estimates of off-farm labour supply elasticity to identify systematic factors that influence these estimates. A sample of 137 elasticities is obtained from 43 studies which use data ranging from 1960 to 2012. We examine theoretical assumptions, data availability and empirical specifications, and other study-specific characteristics. Controlling for potential publication bias, we estimate that the elasticity is approximately 0.64 to 0.77. Results of the analysis show that estimates are affected by modelling choices controlling for self-selection and life-cycle elements. However, we found no compelling evidence that study-specific characteristics of off-farm labour supply functions, including various measurements of labour supply, explain variation in the elasticities.