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...

Land reform and the privatization of agricultural assets in transition is often explained with public choice arguments. These discuss the importance of links between interest groups, party competition and political program design. This paper adds a distributive bargaining concept to the general discussion of how institutions in transition emerge and develop. Based on empirical results, it allow...

Agricultural tenancy reforms have been widely enacted, but evidence on their long-run impact remains limited. In this paper, we provide such evidence by exploiting the quasirandom assignment of linguistically similar areas to different South Indian states that subsequently varied in tenancy regulation policies. Given imperfect credit markets, the impact of tenancy reform should vary by househol...

Empirical evidence from a set of land reform beneficiaries suggests that Zimbabwe’s land reform was successful: the internal rate of return to the land reform project is high, settlers accumulated substantial amounts of assets, and they increased their agricultural productivity substantially over time. This evidence contradicts the general notion that land reform was a failure, a notion support...

This paper discusses issues raised for OECD agricultural and agriculture-related policies by the policy coherence for development perspective. These issues are organised in a five-fold typology covering OECD domestic agricultural policy, agricultural trade policy, regulatory policies, development cooperation policy as well as the coherence of developing country policies. Changes in OECD agricul...

This study empirically investigates the possible link between financial development and international agricultural trade using binomial models of the gravity equations. Financial development is measured by a constructed financial reforms index. The results provide some evidence on the positive impacts of financial reform on agricultural exports. The results further indicate that countries with ...

© 2008 The Authors Journal compilation © 2008 Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8489.2007.00404.x Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK AJAR ustralian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 1364-985X © 2008 The Authors Journ Compilat on © 2008 A str lian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and...

This paper provides evidence regarding gains to agricultural market liberalization in China. We empirically identify the different effects that incentive reforms and gradual market liberalization have on China’s agricultural economy during its transition period. We find that average gains within the agricultural sector to incentive reform exceed gains to market liberalization by a factor of ten...