Reverse share tenancy, wherein poorer landlords rent out land to richer tenants on shares, is a common phenomenon. Yet it does not fit existing theoretical models of sharecropping and has never before been modeled in the economics literature. We explain share tenancy contracts using an asset risk model that incorporates Marshallian inefficiency and thereby provides a credible explanation for sh...

Human society has changed much over the last centuries and this process of 'modernization' has profoundly affected the lives of individuals; currently we live quite different lives from those forefathers lived only five generations ago. There is difference of opinion as to whether we live better now than before, and consequently there is also disagreement as to whether we should continue modern...

Do traditional, agrarian values put minority culture children at a disadvantage in North American schools? The available results are mixed. In this chapter we attempt to “unpack” some of the effects of traditional Latin0 family values on their children’s early school adaptation and achievement. Our research suggests that agrarian-origin values, which differ from academic-occupational orientatio...

There is widespread agreement within academic literature that the NSDAP systematically and effectively targeted the rural areas beginning with the agrarian crisis in 1927/8. However, one issue is left unresolved: were specific levels of agricultural strata differently attracted to the Nazis, and if so, how? In light of the economic and political incentives offered to German peasants with differ...

The twenty-five fold expansion of oil palm cultivation in Sarawak over the past two and a half decades constitutes the most rapid and radical transformation of the agrarian landscape ever seen in that state. From 23,000 ha in 1980, mostly in government schemes, the area planted with oil palm has increased to over 580,000 ha in 2006, mostly in private estates, closing in on an official target of...

Sixteen years after the promulgation of the reforms to Article 27 that regulates land tenure in Mexico, there is consensus among political authorities, public officials, private investors, and scholars that the outcomes have been completely different than were predicted. In spite of the important changes produced in the legal status, internal organization, and governmental interactions of the a...

A major purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of poor governance or ‘state fragility’ in African countries on their overall economic and agrarian performance. The results of our econometric analysis show that a higher level of public security is conducive to lower levels of conflict, whether of an ethnic, religious and regional nature. It also corresponds with greater agricultural val...

The agricultural landscape of NW Spain is mainly inherited from ancient agricultural practices. Its origin can be traced back, at least, to the VI century AD (BOUHIER 1979; CRIADO BOADO 1989; GUITIÁN RIVERA 2001; BALLESTEROS-ARIAS et al. 2006a), although some of its features might have originated in the Iron Age (PARCERO-OUBIÑA 2006) or even the Late Bronze Age (MARTÍNEZ CORTIZAS et al. 2009). ...

This paper studies the long-run impacts of industrial investment on the structural transformation of agrarian local economies. We exploit a massive industrialization campaign in China known as the "Third Front Movement," which invested heavily in the industrial sector in China’s remote and largely agrarian areas (the Third Front Region) in the 1960s and 1970s. Exploiting the quasi-randomness in...

The paper presents the development of a virtual database for the genotypic selection of cereal cultivars starting from phenotypic traits. The database is realized by integrating two existing web databases, Gramene 1 and Graingenes , and a pre-existing data source developed by the Agrarian Faculty of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The integration process gives rise to a virtual inte...