|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Agrarian Institutions and Agricultural Productivity: Africa in the European Mirror
Working paper
Gregory Clark
June 1994 |
| |
|
Attempts to reform agriculture n underdeveloped countries have been informed by the idea that exclusive private property rights were a prerequisite to an efficient agricultural sector. Thus the 1989 World Bank Report Sub Saharan Agriculture. From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, stressed the need for changes in land law from communal property rights towards individualized rights. Yet there has been dispute about whether costly state intervention is required in these matters, or whether land rights will endogenously evolve towards efficient outcomes.
The experience of Europe has seemingly provided pow&fir1 testimony that communal rights in agriculture can be highly ineficient, yet persist for centuries in the absense of state intervention. This paper re-examines the evolution of property rights in England from 1500 to 1837 and finds that contrary to the received wisdom:
1. Taking into account the amount of capital invested in land there was
little difference in efficiency between exclusively private and communal land.
2. Cultivators were thus not trapped by the prevailing set of institutions.
Indeed quite small economic gains were sufficient to make them radically change
the institutional framework.
3. The transition from communal property rights to purely private property
was explicable by changed economic incentives.
Based on the misguided notion that common fields were radically inefficient, which stemmed from the English agrarian reformers, there was a pan-European movement by governments in the eighteenth century to eradicate common fields. This movement largely failed because of resistance from local cultivators. The implication of these finding for England for modern underdeveloped economies is to suggest that expensive Government schemes designed to change agrarian property rights and consolidate land holdings are not any more likely to be worth pursuing until there is evidence of a popular demand for them. |
| |
| Last updated on: 12/19/2006 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|