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...

The purpose of this piece is to explore how we might go about understanding the political conditions for poverty alleviation via agrarian reform. It argues that the traditional conceptualization of agrarian reform and its politics -which presents a near impossibility in typical political configurations -is too limiting. The traditional economic focus on intersection of landed rights, agricultur...

The agrarian reform in Albania included free distribution of land to rural households and the complete break up of the former collective and state farms. These key features of the Albanian reform are in sharp contrast with other Central and Eastern European countries. Our paper explains the choice of the Albanian agricultural privatization and land reform process and the radical decollectivizat...

The Brazilian Agrarian Reform Program has subsidized the settlement of over 425,000 destitute families on previously unproductive land in what has become a very effective vehicle for social inclusion and productivity growth for those settlers who reach the final stage of the process and receive definitive title to the land. Unfortunately, there is a large difference in efficiency and productivi...

We investigate the existence of an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and technical efficiency in Philippine brackishwater pond aquaculture. The study is motivated by the exemption of fish ponds from the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Laws and suggestions in the literature of inefficient management of fish farms. The analysis of technical efficiency is based on the estimation of a multi...

In Mexico, the bdemocratization of natural assetsQ through an agrarian reform process laid the territorial foundation for the establishment of a large community forest sector. The common property regime and agrarian policies established by the Mexican Revolution also created a common form of governance for all of rural Mexico. Concepts from common property theory and social and natural capital ...

Sustained industrial growth has been widely acknowledged as an engine of economic transformation. Less developed countries, however, remained predominantly agrarian due to lack of dynamism in the industrial economy and the low level of industrialization. Economic policy reform programme was initiated in July 1991 to generate essential dynamism in the industrial sector for successful transformat...