This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality, incorporating indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. An intra-household model of joint production explains how divisions and land transactions emerge to avoid inefficient free-riding, and how they are affected by land reform and growth in household size. These...

This article presents a case of using property rights to govern land use in the high country of New Zealand’s South Island. It tells the story of a land reform policy and its implementation over two decades, through changes in rules and governing parties. It observes land reform outcomes that are surprisingly favourable to pastoral leaseholders, and surprisingly unfavourable to the Crown. It th...

This chapter focuses on the rural dimensions of the ‘two economies’ debate, and in particular on the question of what contribution land and agrarian reform can make to reducing inequality and addressing the structural nature of rural poverty in post-apartheid South Africa. It suggests that the problem needs to be conceptualised in terms of an ‘agrarian question of the dispossessed’, that can on...

This paper uses data from a household survey to estimate changes in land distribution in rural West Bengal between 1967-2004 and decompose these into contributions of different factors. There was a substantial drop in land per household and land per capita, while within-village inequality rose. The latter was associated mainly with rising landlessness induced by high rates of household division...

This paper investigates the issue of child labor in the context of land reforms in transition economies, using farm household data from the Republic of Georgia. The results show that an increase in landholdings as an outcome of the land reform can, in the presence of market imperfections, lead to an increase in child labor. This is because the increased demand for labor on the family farm is st...

The pre-reform period was characterized by state monopoly of land and by land use that did not require any payment. The legal principles of land reform in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union were set in 1989 by the Basic Law on Land Legislation in the USSR and the Soviet Republics. This law established the right of the citizens to receive land in permanent or temporary use for agricu...

Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of ...

Following initial enthusiasm in the post-war period, land reform fell out of favour with donors from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, sporadic efforts to redistribute land continued: Ethiopia in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and a renewed commitment to land reform in the Philippines in 1988. These reforms stemmed from shifts in the domestic balance of power between landowners and landless workers and pea...

In South Africa, following decades of apartheid, which included racially-based land dispossessions, the post-apartheid government has implemented a land reform programme, which allows people to re-claim the land they were forcefully removed from. Many of these land claims are targeting conservation areas, and this has resulted in the conservation and land reform sectors often coming into confli...