I. Introduction The World Bank's report devoted only few pages to agricultural performance. The main argument was that the economies comprising East were characterized by more dynamic agricultural sectors than other parts of the developing world; agricultural income growth had been faster, and agricultural labour force growth slower than in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Latin America. Thus the growth of labour productivity in was much faster. The reasons for this were twofold: the economies (or at least those designated by the World Bank as performing, abbreviated to HPAEs) had devoted a larger share of their public investment to rural areas than other developing economies, and direct and indirect taxation of was typically low in comparison with many other economies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Some caveats were admitted: Indonesia's performance in rural infrastructure development lagged behind that of China, Malaysia, and Thailand, while agricultural taxation (or negative agricultural protection) in Thailand in the 1960s and 1970s was at least as high as in South Asia or the Philippines. But Thailand did reform agricultural taxation in the 1980s, although it was conceded that in that decade Thailand was characterized by slow agricultural growth (World Bank 1993, pp. 32-37). In the concluding chapter of the Asian Miracle report, the success of the HPAEs in limiting the bias against was again stressed. The emphasis was on rapid adoption of new technologies, investment in rural infrastructure and limited agricultural taxation (World Bank 1993, p. 352). There was no discussion of land reform, or how that might have contributed to the strong performance of in economies such as China or Taiwan. There was an implicit assumption, which is also found in many other discussions of agricultural policy in Asia, that Asian agriculture is characterized by relatively egalitarian distribution of income, well-functioning factor markets, and strong emphasis on educational expansion (Deininger and Olinto 2001, p. 464). This in turn has led to rapid growth in off-farm employment opportunities, and broad-based rural development which benefits all households. There has been little attempt, either by the international development agencies, or indeed by independent scholars, to subject this view to critical scrutiny, or to examine the policies which might have created this egalitarian pattern. This article argues that in fact the Asian of egalitarian agricultural development is based on the experience of only very few countries. Indeed it sometimes appears that the entire model has been erected on the basis of the experience of Taiwan. In fact, the agricultural development which has occurred in much of Southeast Asia since the 1960s has been less egalitarian than in Taiwan, precisely because it has taken place in the context of an unreformed or partially reformed agrarian structure, where the distribution of land and incomes are more skewed, the labour intensity of agricultural production is lower, and linkages between on-farm and off-farm income growth are less pronounced. The article begins with discussion of growth in agricultural output, before addressing distribution of land, labour absorption in agriculture, linkages between growth in agricultural incomes and nonagricultural incomes, and changing patterns of rural employment and household income. II. Trends in Agricultural Output Growth in Southeast Asia since the 1950s During the colonial era, agricultural development in much of Southeast Asia was propelled by growing populations pushing out the cultivation frontiers on the one hand, and growing involvement in world markets for tropical agricultural produce on the other. Technological change was mainly limited to export crops grown on large estates; in smallholder indigenous agriculture, growing populations replicated traditional methods of cultivation over more land. …
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Dec 20, 2014
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