Land Reform in Developing Countries
non-fiction work by Michael Lipton
Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs is a 2009 book by the Leontief Prize–winning economist Michael Lipton. It is a comprehensive review of land reform issues in developing countries and focuses on the evidence of which land reforms have worked and which have not.
Summary
The introduction defines land reform as comprising "laws with the main goal of reducing poverty by substantially increasing the proportion of farmland controlled by the poor, and thereby their income, power or status"(the appendix gives a more precise definition). It then expands on what is meant by poverty and how land reform still "matters", especially as according to Lipton "land is poor people's main productive asset" and "at least 1.5 billion people today have some farmland as a result of land reform, and are less poor, or not poor, as a result." However, for Lipton, "huge, inefficient land inequalities remain, or have re-emerged, in many low-income countries. Land reform remains both 'unfinished business' (...) and alive and well."
Chapter 1 analyses the goals of stakeholders involved in land reform: public authorities, landowners, farmers and other directly affected persons as well as the goals for land reform advocated by outsiders, from aid donors to economists and philosophers. Land reform normally advances one widely shared goal, equality of opportunity, but it can retard another, liberty to enjoy 'legitimate' property rights. This chapter looks at the trade-offs and how various types of claimed land reform affect these goals and others, notably poverty reduction, sustainability, economic efficiency and economic growth.
Chapter 2 explores the impact of land reform and land policy on farm and non-farm growth and efficiency. It looks at the long debate on whether "there is an inverse relationship (IR) in labour-abundant countries", such that "small farms produce more, per hectare per year, than large farms". Lipton concludes that careful and recent work in Africa and elsewhere confirms that, "mainly due to the IR plus land scarcity, redistributive land reform in developing countries normally increases farm output."
Chapters 3-6 review the experience with different types of policies, variously labelled as land reform.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16959769. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009.
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