Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs

by Lipton; Michael

• ISBN13: 9780415096676
• ISBN10: 0415096677
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-10
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Redistributing land rights is a tricky subject and one that easily becomes controversial as recent experience has shown. This new book calmly examines the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of land redistribution.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCING LAND REFORM(a) Why land reform matters(b) The structure of the book: definitions, goals, efficiency, death, future(c) The argument(d) Has human suffering retreated?(e) Has much land reform happened?(f) Have the land reforms helped reduce suffering?(g) So what is wrong with classical land reform?(h) New methods of land reformCHAPTER 2. DEFINITIONS: WHAT COUNTS AS LAND REFORM?(a) The problem of definition(b) Candidate land reforms and their institutional environments(c) Classic land reform: ceilings, redistribution, and the Land Authority model(d) The other candidates: land reform or land deform?(e) Alternatives, complements and diversions(f) Sheep, poison and prayer: New Wave land reform?CHAPTER 3. POLICY GOALS AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF LAND REFORM(a) What goals? Whose? What policy implications?(b) The main goal: poverty reduction and redistribution - what about freedom?(c) Other relevant 'objective' goals(d) Goals of governments and donors: land reform to extract surpluses(e) Goals of governments and donors: reform to stop revolution?(f) Goals of beneficiaries: participation and land reformCHAPTER 4. SIZE, EFFICIENCY, GROWTH: BEYOND INVERSE RELATIONSHIPS?(a) What the debate is about, and why it matters(b) How transaction costs favour small farmers in developing countries only(c) The inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and performance:: some evidence(d) Prior issues(Non-linearity; activity splitting)(e) Is The IR explained by better land quality on smaller farms?(f) Do green revolutions destroy the IR?(g) Land reform, land inequality and national economic performance: 'general equilibrium'?(h) Risk and the IRCHAPTER 5. DEATH OF LAND REFORM: PAST, PROCEEDING, DESIRABLE? (a) The gravediggers' case: has land reform stopped? Should it stop?(b) Is access to land rights less unequal than it seems?(c) Land reform: failure or incomplete success?(d) Does farmland reform now not matter 1: Are most of the poor now urban?(e) Does farmland reform now not matter 2: Have many rural poor moved outside farming?(f) Does farmland reform now not matter 3: Are farming poor now more labourers than farmers? The emergence of employment impact as the key to the land reform debate(g) Development, globalisation and the fate of the IR: land reform in the supermarket age?CHAPTER 6. WHAT FUTURE FOR LAND REFORM, WHERE, HOW?