What patterns can be discerned in the distribution of farm sizes across countries and over time? How does the behavior of individual economic agents interact with the natural environment and general economic development to affect farm size? How has concerted human intervention, understood as...

This paper analyzes effects of the Republic of Korea's two major rural reforms in 1950 and 1962/63 on agricultural productivity and individual well-being. The 1950 Land Reform resulted in a large-scale redistribution of land while "green revolution"-type reforms in 1962/63 pushed forward the...

Access to land and particularly its distribution has reemerged as an important part of both academic and policy discussions in the last decade, leading to the resuscitation of the debate on the relationship between size of holdings and output per land unit. Across the world, studies have...

This paper shows that using yields may not be informative of the relationship between farm size and productivity in the context of small-scale farming. This occurs because, in addition to productivity, yields pick up size-dependent market distortions and decreasing returns to scale. As a result,...

Latin American and Caribbean countries have historically been known for their rates of land inequality, highest in the world. However, these countries also exhibit a high degree of heterogeneity in their patterns of land concentration and average farm sizes. These cross-country differences play...

In developing agricultures, past research has suggested an inverse relationship between farm productivity and size. The raw data from China show such an inverse relationship. However, the inverse relationship disappears after we instrument for land area using the fact that one of the objectives...

This article analyzes the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability. A framework is set out to explain the inverse farm size--productivity relationship based on imperfections in the markets for labor, land, credit and risk. Hypotheses are derived...

This paper examines whether sharecroppers and fixed-rent tenants in the rice farms of South Asia are distinguished by their farming skills. The idea that fixed-rent contracts are typically given to relatively skilled tenants dates back to the agricultural (tenancy) ladder hypothesis of Spillman...

Against the rising global concern of how to achieve sustainable output expansion in food, we document the main outcomes of post-Soviet agricultural recovery and restructuring in the Kazakhstan grain region. Together with an expansion of cropland area and increasing capital input, real...

A UK-based economist and historian adapts the Fernandez-Rodrik model to demonstrate how rural opposition to land reform in present-day Russia is a consequence of individually rational decisions by members of former state and collective farms regarding whether to support further land reform or...