Concentration Of Land Ownership Research Articles

More landless, more problems: Investigating the relationship between land and income inequality in Africa

Background: In pursuit of greater equality, African nations have implemented land reforms to increase land ownership among indigenous citizens. Despite these efforts, Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal regions.Aim: In line with the sustainable developmental goals (SDGs) 10 of the Equal World campaign, the study investigates how land ownership influences income inequality in African countries. We create a unique time series measuring landholders per square kilometre of agricultural land and explore its relationship with income inequality.Setting: The analysis covered the period of 2000–2020, using data from the World Bank gender data portal and World Bank Development Indicators to compute the land inequality index.Method: Conventional cointegration and advanced wavelet coherence techniques are employed to examine the influence of land ownership on inequality.Results: Traditional estimators reveal a long-run positive relationship between land ownership and income inequality, with bi-directional causality, implying that African countries with higher (lower) land concentration are associated with higher (lower) levels of inequality. However, wavelet coherence analysis reveals that only 8 countries exhibit a positive relationship, while 16 show a negative relationship, and 2 show an insignificant relationship. Notably, most countries with a negative (positive) relationship (did not) implement additional land reforms after 2000.Conclusion: We conclude that countries that fail to undergo continuous adjustments in land reforms risk experiencing a higher concentration of land ownership and income inequality. This study’s findings underscore the importance of land policy updates for long-term equity.Contribution: Unlike previous studies using the Gini Land coefficient, this study measure agricultural landowners per square kilometre, capturing the entire population and its relationship with income inequality.

Exploring land acquisition and restructuring policy in Addis Ababa

This study examines the political economy underlying the design and implementation of land acquisition and restructuring, a territorial policy aimed at reducing affluence disparity. It focuses on the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where major land invasions occurred between September 2015 and March 2022 in response to prolonged and acute inequality. Local authorities solicited and even coordinated the arriving land speculators. Moreover, land invasion has been empirically fueled not only by land concentration but also by increasing land prices. To better understand this relationship, a regression analysis was conducted on 154 incidents of land attained throughout the silk-lafto sub-cities of Addis Ababa. The study examined various indicators including the concentration of land ownership, market competition, land invaded per capita, literacy rate, land expropriated and reassigned per capita, and unemployment rate. The results show that Ethiopia's land leasing policy, driven by high speculative prices, intensified land inequality and influenced land invasions throughout the city. This has led to a surge in land prices and worsened the problem of land inequality. The findings provide evidence of political struggles regarding the issue of land ownership inequality and show that socio-political pressures exist in both the planning and implementation phases of land-based policies.

Revealing agricultural land ownership concentration with cadastral and company network data

AbstractIn many high-income countries, agricultural land is highly concentrated in a few hands, but detailed knowledge of ownership structures is limited. We examined land ownership structures and agricultural land concentration for the entire state of Brandenburg, Germany (1.3 million ha), using cadastral and company network data. Our aim was to characterise all landowners, analyse the degree of ownership concentration, and examine the role of the largest landowners in more detail. We found a high fragmentation of ownership among 185,000 different owners. Most of the land was owned by individuals not active in agriculture and only a third of the land was owned by farmers and other agricultural actors. Absentee ownership covered a quarter of the land. Ownership concentration was low to moderate in most regions and reached high levels in only a few areas. The largest owners were public institutions, private investors and nature protection institutions. Areas where public institutions owned a lot of land showed high concentrations, but also some areas where private landowners owned a lot of land. In summary, our analysis provides rare information on the concentration of agricultural land ownership in a large region. Such analysis facilitates better justification and design of policies that regulate agricultural land markets.

Who owns the city? Neoliberal urbanism and land purchases in Gurgaon, India

Increasing purchases of valuable real estate for storing capital have contributed to the soaring prices of modest housing in many global cities and in several South Asian cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Saskia Sassen has drawn attention to the phenomenon of underutilisation of purchased properties existing alongside the acute demand for housing by low- and moderate-income households in the same cities. Despite the gravity of this issue, empirical analyses of urban land transactions remain rare, especially because such purchases often tend to be piecemeal and obscure, involving a multitude of smaller land deals and a variety of actors. This paper examines corporate purchases of urban land in Gurgaon, a city adjacent to New Delhi that has embraced neoliberal economic policies. By creating a land database for the upcoming sectors in the city, the study makes sharply visible: (1) the radical changes in property ownership patterns from agricultural land to luxury gated communities, (2) the growing corporate investments, extreme concentration of land ownership and deeply unequal distribution of urban land and (3) the use of various illicit practices by market-leading companies in land banking.

Landlessness and Rural Poverty in Pakistan

Poverty imposes a repressive weight on Pakistan particularly in rural areas where almost one third of population and majority of the poor live. Although poverty has declined during the 1970s and 1980s, the absolute number of poor has increased substantially since the 1960s. Despite a number of policy initiatives and programmes undertaken for poverty alleviation by various governments, absolute poverty particularly in rural areas continued to rise in Pakistan during the 1990s. Much has been written about poverty in Pakistan so far. A number of attempts have been made by various authors/institutions to estimate the rural poverty in Pakistan in the 1990s. Discussions have remained limited to estimating the regional and provincial trends for rural poverty in Pakistan. Although landlessness and rural poverty in Pakistan received significant attention in the 1970 and 1980, discussions on this issue remained limited in the 1990s. Landlessness and rural poverty are closely linked since land is a principal asset in a rural economy like Pakistan. Landlessness to agricultural land is considered to be the most important contributor to rural poverty. A high concentration of landownership is a major constraint to agricultural growth and alleviation of poverty. There is a general perception that highly skewed distribution of land in Pakistan is one of the important causes of widespread poverty particularly in rural areas.

Short men in poor lands: The agrarian workers from southwestern Spain in anthropometric perspective

With a sample of heights of almost 60,000 men, born between 1855 and 1979 and recruited between 1876 and 2000, our work analyzes the nutritional gap between the agrarian and non-agrarian population in Extremadura, a Spanish region located among the poorest ones in Europe. The analysis reveals that this difference is not only statistically significant, but also tends to increase as the average stature of the active population grows. Among the causes of the agrarian height penalty, our article focuses mainly on the economic differences. However, the research also insists on the roots of these differences, especially those linked to the adverse physical conditions of the territory, the dynamics of the Christian conquest in the Middle Ages and the strong and persistent concentration of land ownership in the region. In short, this paper concludes that the anthropometric gap between agrarian and non-agrarian workers is due not only to economic causes, but also to geographical, historical and institutional reasons.

Landownership concentration and human capital accumulation in post-unification Italy

This paper contributes to the debate on institutions and economic development by assessing the relationship between landownership concentration and education. Using historical data at both the district and province levels in post-unification Italy from 1871 to 1921, I find evidence of an adverse effect of land inequality on literacy rates. Instrumental variable estimates using malaria pervasiveness as a source of exogenous variation rule out concerns regarding potential endogeneity. Exploration of the panel dimension of the data reveals that several shocks during this period affected the relationship between land inequality and literacy rates. In addition, this paper provides insights into the mechanism behind this relationship by analyzing the impact on intermediate outputs, such as enrollment rates in primary school, child-teacher ratio, school density, child labor, and municipality expenditures. Land inequality may have adversely affected literacy rates not only by influencing schooling supply through the political process but also through the private demand for education.

Landed Nation: Land Reform and Ethnic Diversity in the Interwar Polish Parliament

AbstractThis article investigates the ethnic entanglements of the land reform debate in the first Polish Diet (1919–1922). Against the backdrop of global comparative studies, interwar Poland, haunted by land hunger, rural poverty, and high concentration of land ownership, is an odd case. Despite conditions conducive to far-reaching land reforms, that is, a high level of inter-elite conflict and semiautocratic order, the Polish reform was very moderate, if not disappointing. Unpacking the series of moves in the debate and the sequence of hairbreadth voting on its shape, I ask why, despite broad acceptance of the reform across the political spectrum, it could not attract enough support to be swiftly executed. The ethnic composition of the country triggered controversies concerning German farmers and peasants of the ethnically diversified eastern borderlands. Major political parties shared tacit Polish nationalism, but the history of political alignments made the nationalist politicians susceptible to the lobbying of the landed elite and estranged them from peasant parties. The land holdings of nobles were considered a bulwark of the nation, which effectively blocked the alternative idea of integrating the ethnic minorities via land ownership.

Rapid urbanization, land pooling policies & the concentration of wealth

The research discusses how land pooling policies can become part of predisposed institutional frameworks that support processes of land ownership concentration when embedded in the complex, multilayered context of governmental coordination. Land pooling policies are being promoted by international organizations, the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and other best-practice literature for their potential to supply urban land and utilize part of the land value increment from urbanization to cover the costs for infrastructure, public facilities and construction. In this literature land pooling policies are characterized as equitable land policies because they proportionally distribute the development gain back to the original landowners. However, land pooling policies are no ‘silver bullet’ for an equitable urbanization. Depending on the institutionalization in the larger framework of national policies, land pooling policies might become included into processes of ground rent dispossession when embedded in the context of overlaying policies with contradictory objectives on diverse governance levels. This can support land transactions that in sum lead to a concentration of land ownership. The research analyses the case of the Republic of Korea, where land pooling policies have been the dominating land policies during the period of rapid urbanization in order to reveal new knowledge on the distributional characteristics of those policies in practice. The study makes clear how government coordination in the narrow perspective (land pooling policies) and in the wide perspective (national planning policies) affects the key transaction dimensions (land values, information impactedness and financing) which causes the diffusion of the equitable character of land pooling policies. The findings are valuable for the academic discourse as well as the best practice literature. Based on the findings the study closes with a set of recommendations for a more equitable implementation of land pooling policies that might be valuable for policy makers, planners, and academics especially in countries that are confronted with the challenges of rapid urbanization.

Land Inequality and Workfare Policies

This paper contributes to the relatively scant literature on the impacts of inequality on the efficacy of public works programmes. We study this in the context of India. In particular, we examine the effect of land inequality on the implementation of the world’s largest workfare programme – the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Our OLS estimates demonstrate that the concentration of land ownership reduces the efficacy of NREGA. An instrumental variable (IV) analysis, where we use the historical land tenure system as an IV for contemporaneous land inequality, further corroborates our findings. This negative relationship is consistent with the hypothesis that public work schemes raise agricultural wages in the private labour market, thereby incentivising big landlords to use their political power to oppose such programmes. We exclude the possibility that the higher provision of public jobs in more equal areas is driven by a higher demand for public jobs or by caste or religious differences. This study suggests that the concentration of land ownership, a proxy for power asymmetries, could hinder effective implementation of development policies.

Market Power in Agricultural Land Markets: Concepts and Empirical Challenges

This paper provides review about challenges and opportunities to assess and quantify market power in agricultural land markets. Measuring land market power is challenging because the characteristics of this production factor hinder the direct application of familiar concepts from commodity markets. Immobility, fixed availability, and large heterogeneity of land and potential users contradict assumptions of fictitious point market for homogeneous goods. Moreover, the use of concentration indicators for policy assessments is hampered by two problems. First, defining the relevant regional size of the market is challenging and concentration indicators are not robust with regard to market size and number of actors. Second, high concentration of land ownership or land operation may point at potential market power, but it may also be the result of an efficient allocation of land due to structural change in agriculture. The aforementioned challenges are illustrated with a case study for the Federal State of Brandenburg in Germany. Using available data for land sales, a regression analysis reveals a negative relationship between land use concentration and farmland prices. This result can be interpreted as an indication of market power on the buyer side in agricultural land markets. However, it is hardly possible to translate this finding into recommendations for land market regulations because the evaluation of the potential misuse of dominant positions in land markets requires a case-specific analysis. Providing evidence for the exertion of market power in land markets is extremely complex and deserves further attention from researchers and politicians.

Private forest owners’ sense of landownership: Motives, influential factors and landscape context

Legal ownership of land defines the formal relationship between a landowner and land. Besides legal ownership, there is also psychological ownership which landowners can develop toward land. Despite the abundant literature on the relationships between landowners and land, it remains unclear under which circumstances a sense of ownership over land occurs and what impacts individual feelings may have on landscape dynamics if aggregated or scaled up. Building upon the psychological ownership theory, we interviewed 442 private forest owners in Croatia about the benefits of landownership. By using a Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) structural equation model and local spatial autocorrelation statistics, we 1) analyzed whether landownership benefits correlate to three motives for psychological ownership, i.e. having a place, efficacy and effectance, and self-identity; 2) analyzed the factors stimulating the motives; and 3) located the areas of spatial concentration of psychological landownership (i.e. hotspots/coldspots). Landownership benefits showed a strong association with the corresponding motives indicating that private forest owners experience landownership as a connection between the self and forest. Physical work in the forest and tending young forests increase psychological landownership. The land tenure system and duration of ownership plays no role. The biggest hotspot appeared in the most developed area, possibly preventing land transfer. Coldspots, in contrast, emerged across the country, pointing to land which could potentially change ownership after the land market regulation expires in 2023. The findings expand the understanding of land possession beyond the dis(investment) paradigm and help predict hotspots of land transfers at local to regional scales.

Knowledge Production and Land Relations in the Bioeconomy. A Case Study on the Brazilian Sugar-Bioenergy Sector

National bioeconomy strategies aim for a comprehensive transition from a fossil-based to a biomass-based economy. One common feature of the strategies is the optimistic reliance on technology as main tool in order to overcome the socio-ecological crisis. From the critical perspectives of political ecology and the political economy of research and innovation, technologies and technological innovations are not neutral solutions to the problem; they are generally socially embedded. Against this backdrop, we contextualise the technological innovations that support a more climate-friendly production of ethanol on a sugarcane basis, building on a field research in the more recently developed cultivation areas in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. In doing so, we explore the co-production of the green framing of the sector in combination with technologies for a more climate-friendly agriculture and the political economy of land. Our investigation shows that the bioeconomy in the sugar-ethanol sector perpetuates the socio-ecological problems associated with the agricultural sector. These socio-ecological problems range from the increasing concentration of landownership to the negative impact of agrotoxins.

Landownership Concentration and Human Capital Accumulation in Post-Unification Italy (1871–1921)

Landownership Concentration and Human Capital Accumulation in Post-Unification Italy (1871–1921)

Is the Rent Too High? Land Ownership and Monopoly Power

We investigate the sources, scope, and implications of landowner market power. We show how zoning regulations generate spillovers through increased markups and derive conditions under which restricting landownership concentration reduces rents. Using newbuilding-level data from New York City, we find that a 10% increase in ownership concentration in a Census tract is correlated with a 1% increase in rent. Market power is substantial: on average, markups account for nearly a third of rents in Manhattan. Furthermore, pecuniary spillovers between zoning constraints and markups at other buildings are appreciable. Up-zoning that results in 417 additional housing units at zoning-constrained buildings reduces markups on policy-unconstrained units and generates between 5 and 19 additional units through increased competition.

Acceso a la tierra y su relación con la autonomía alimentaria en el corregimiento de Bitaco municipio de La Cumbre Valle del Cauca, Colombia

La concentración de la propiedad de la tierra ha afectado en gran medida a la producción agrícola de nuestro país, tanto que las dinámicas actuales del capital económico amenazan seriamente el derecho a una alimentación adecuada. En el caso de Colombia, observamos una situación problemática en donde las comunidades campesinas están siendo despojadas de sus territorios, para ser entregados a monopolios y empresas trasnacionales. la concentración de la tierra por parte de estas empresas ocasiona múltiples contrariedades entre ellas; una notoria reducción de la tierra y extracción de los recursos naturales lo cual, impide desarrollar las diferentes actividades agrícolas productivas de las comunidades campesinas.

South Africa’s Land Ownership System as a Barrier to Social Transformation

Racially based land ownership continues to create conflict, and like the capitalist system it anchors, has blocked meaningful social transformation since the end of formal apartheid. Failed land reform is partly a reflection of global processes increasingly shaping dynamics within South Africa and other countries, accelerating the concentration of land ownership and agriculture, with a sharp downward effect on the rural poor. Through the prism of the extensive displacement of farm labour families from white commercial farms, based on two periods of research since 1996, the article looks at the social relations of property and production, as well as the conflicts between owners and farm labour – labour tenants and farmworkers. They centre on farm owners’ strong opposition to tenure reform and land rights, illustrating not only the social impact but the barriers to change that these relations help to maintain.

Feeding the World: Brazil’s Transformation into a Modern Agricultural Economy. By Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 413 pp. $94.99 cloth $32.99 paper

Esteemed co-authors Klein and Vidal Luna have added one more outstanding book to their previous important volumes that exhaustively explored the economic and demographic history of Brazil, slavery, the Cold War, and the period of the military dictatorship, 1964–1985. Feeding the World traces the change in Brazilian agriculture from a long-standing colonial legacy of reliance on single exports (sugar and coffee), based on low-technology and the continuing incorporation of new lands on the internal frontier, using unskilled labor and few agricultural inputs. By contrast, today Brazil is one of the top five world producers of thirty-six agricultural products, and the first- or second-largest exporter of dozens of crops including oranges, sugar, beef, chicken, corn, and soy, using highly mechanized production techniques, advanced agricultural research, and highly developed systems for agricultural credit and inputs.How did this thoroughgoing transformation happen over the past fifty years? The aim of the book is to provide an explanation, particularly given the contrasting failure of Brazil’s efforts to modernize its industrial sector. The authors argue that the transformation of Brazilian commercial agriculture was due to “the introduction of new products, the occupation of new spaces, and the utilization of the most modern technology available in the market” (2). embrapa, Brazil’s outstanding agricultural research institute, emerged during this period to develop and promote a number of innovations in tropical agriculture. Re-organization and integration of the systems of agricultural credit and marketing led to an impressive growth in production and agricultural exports. The strategy adopted to modernize Brazilian agriculture avoided land-reform initiatives such as those undertaken by many other Latin American nations to address the persistent concentration of landownership. Instead, Brazil’s military government undertook a “conservative agricultural revolution,” providing incentives for traditional landowners to become modern farmers, while leaving traditional land tenure systems intact.Under the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, agricultural development became a priority to keep urban food costs low and overcome the concentrated structure of power and land in rural areas that was an impediment to agricultural development. The regime introduced subsidized credit, minimum pricing policies, and government purchase of agricultural stocks. The military regime also initiated embrapa’s sophisticated agricultural-research program, the factor that “best explains agricultural productivity gains over the past 20 years” through the development of new seed and cattle varieties as well as other technologies implemented on the acidic soils of the cerrado region, primarily in Mato Grosso (41). During the economic crisis of the 1980s, these agricultural-support policies were largely eliminated in favor of the adoption of neoliberal policies, leading market actors to develop integrated systems that would become the principal source of commercial agricultural credit. These changes allowed Brazilian commercial farmers to compete successfully on the world market because of the high productivity of its agriculture.This well-written and data-rich economic history combines a broad understanding of social history with painstaking quantitative analysis from multiple official sources to demonstrate key points and paint a thorough picture of the historical trends. The book, which is organized into nine chapters plus an introduction and conclusions, presents voluminous data—21 maps, 62 graphs, and 107 tables meticulously support its findings and conclusions regarding how and why Brazil became the world’s largest food exporter.The first chapter, “Antecedents,” discusses the evolution of Brazilian agriculture from the colonial period until the 1960s, and the second chapter provides a detailed portrait of the post-1960 “new agricultural economy.” The third chapter reviews the many causes that contributed to this dramatic transformation. The fourth chapter focuses more specifically on the inputs, technology, productivity, and sustainability of Brazilian commercial agriculture. Chapter 5 discusses the important regional differences in wealth, rural well-being, and farm size, and Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus, respectively, on the states of Mato Grosso, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo to demonstrate the important regional variations in the evolution of commercial agriculture over the last half-century. Chapter 9 focuses on the “Agrarian Question” and the fate of Brazil’s noncommercial farmers, who were largely left out of the conservative modernization approach adopted in Brazil, leading to persistent violent land conflicts and deforestation, especially in the northern and northeastern regions. In these regions, the authors show that even in official colonization areas, poor living conditions and educational levels, as well as low incomes, prevail among farmers largely relegated to the traditional agricultural practices of a century ago.

Land invasions and land reform in Basilicata, Italy: an evaluation of place-based policies

ABSTRACT The paper analyses the political economy that characterized the design and implementation of a particular place-based policy aimed at addressing wealth inequality, that is, land reform. It focuses on Basilicata in the Italian south, where massive land invasions took place between December 1949 and March 1950 in reaction to long-lasting and extreme inequality. The invading peasants were solicited and even coordinated by local Communist Party leaders. Empirical analysis shows that land invasions were driven not only by the concentration of land ownership but also by the strength of the Communist Party. Furthermore, towns that had experienced land invasions were more likely to be affected by the agrarian reform, and that this policy was more intense in those towns. The results are interpreted as evidence that land ownership was the object of a clear consolidation strategy by the Communist Party and of issue ownership competition with the subsequent implementation of land reform.

A propriedade da terra no Uruguai: Formação social, politicas publicas, território e industria de celulose

Desde o ano 2005, com a chegada ao governo da força progressista da “Frente Ampla”, o Uruguai atravessa por um ciclo de estabilidade político- econômica e governabilidade que tem lhe permitido manter um ritmo de crescimento relativamente constante, em um contexto regional marcado pela arremetida do conservadorismo e a direita neoliberal. Durante este ciclo foram notórios os avanços em matéria de direitos individuais e laborais, na redução da pobreza e exclusão social, etc., em consonância com a consolidação de um modelo produtivo baseado na exportação em grande escala de produtos primários e caracterizado pela concentração e anonimato sobre a propriedade da terra. Isto, por sua vez, se apoia em políticas públicas que estabelecem um marco regulatório que garante grandes vantagens ás empresas (concessões, isenções fiscais, etc.), visando assim atrair investimentos (estrangeiros) como forma de inserção internacional. A indústria da celulose, que começou em 2007, baseada no monocultivo de eucalipto, é hoje um pilar fundamental deste modelo, com a particularidade de ser uma indústria conduzida por grandes empresas transnacionais, que produzem baixo o regime de Zonas Francas e que são as maiores proprietárias de terra no país. Com a iminente instalação de uma terceira fábrica de produção de celulose, abrem-se novas questões em relação à propriedade da terra, a forma de organização espacial das empresas, sob a relação entre estas e o Estado e sobre a capacidade de este de regular soberanamente o território nacional.
 
 Palavras–chave: Formação social - Políticas públicas – Território – Indústria de celulose