Land Reform, its Effects on the Rice Sector, and Economic Development: Empirical Case Study in Taiwan

Land reforms in developing countries provide a good experiment for study on development economics, and in the case Taiwan the land reform provides specific historical context for us to closely examine the relationship between redistribution and growth. In this paper, we use panel data on the fifteen counties of Taiwan around 1950s and 1960s to empirically evaluate whether redistributive land reform has had significant positive influence on land productivity and real capital accumulation. The main finding is that such a land reform incentivized landowner cultivator to improve rice productivity and indirectly financed national industrialization