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

By Maitreesh Ghatak, Sanchari Roy. 2007

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78f430321b73a64c237185675f2bc2bcecccbede

Citations in the corpus

• Land Reform and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Micro Data (2019, unknown): “On the other hand, tenancy reforms had a positive effect on productivity in West Bengal where reforms were implemented more rigorously (Ghatak and Roy, 2007; Banerjee, Gertler, and Ghatak, 2002; Bardhan and Mookherjee, 2007).”
• Agriculture and Development: A Brief Review of the Literature (2011, unknown): “Mearns (1995) explains that ceilings in India have redistributed land to the poor, but Ghatak and Roy (2007) find the effect on productivity of this redistribution to be negative.”