Land reform and agricultural productivity in India: a review of the evidence

In this paper we review as well as contribute to the empirical literature on the impact of landreform on agricultural productivity in India. We find that, overall for all states, land-reform legislation had anegative and significant effect on agricultural productivity. However, this hides considerable variation acrosstypes of land reform, as well as variation across states. Decomposing by type of land reform, the main driverfor this negative effect seems to be land-ceiling legislation. In contrast, the effect of tenancy reform, averagedacross all states, is insignificant. There seems to be a wide range of state-specific effects, which suggests thatfocusing on average treatment effects can hide a considerable amount of heterogeneity. In particular, allowinga separate slope for West Bengal, one of the few states that implemented tenancy laws rigorously, we findthat land reform had a marginal positive effect relative to the rest of India.[...]