Relevant Research Programs to Be Conducted in Developing Countries

Abstract

W E HAVE been asked to write under a title that is very broad and rather vague. To give our discussion focus, we will address ourselves to some questions on land reform and agricultural development in Chile. We believe, however, that our formulation of the issues and the research we suggest has application to other developing countries, especially in Latin America. Underdevelopment is not only a matter of low per capita productivity, income, consumption, education, and capital investment. These are all symptoms of underdevelopment, but saying little about the social organization of a society, they scarcely define the issue. Since agricultural development takes place within a specific social-institutional context, the structure itself, of which land tenure is an important part, must be analyzed. In its most basic sense, land reform means a redistribution of economic and political power through a reordering of the rights to the use of resources. To institute and implement a land reform is a tough political task since it challenges the existing social-institutional structure.' In addition to the internal structure, there is another aspect to the setting within which land reform must occur. Because of its size, wealth, power and commitments, the U.S. is a strategic part of the situation. Research programs in developing countries should not be built solely on the assumption of U.S. experts working with nationals helping them research their problems. The issues under discussion, like land reform, are not all internal to the developing country. Thus we present a series of hypotheses which constitute our estimation of why land reform and agricultural development are so difficult to achieve. We have not tested these hypotheses. But we offer them as important areas of investigation in economic development. Following our discussion of the social and institutional structure, we detail a number of specific research projects which seem relevant for agricultural economics.2