Tasso Adamopoulosy
York University
This Draft: January 2006
Abstract
Can the initial distribution of land, in a country's early history,
affect its subsequent economic development? In this paper, I show that
when land ownership is sufficiently concentrated, the landed elite
will lobby the government to raise barriers to industrialization in
order to protect its rents in the rural economy. Barriers, which take
the form of sectoral policies that disadvantage the development of
industry in favor of agriculture, can affect both the timing and the
pace of industrialization. I show quantitatively that this theory
matches well with the divergent development experiences of Canada and
Argentina. Even though these two countries had the same level of
income per capita in 1850 and shared many other initial conditions,
Canada took-off while Argentina experienced a deterioration of its
position in the world income distribution. I provide evidence that,
Argentina had a markedly higher inequality in land ownership than
Canada. I show, in the context of my model, that the observed
differences in land distributions in the 19th century, through their
effects on equilibrium policies, can produce equilibrium output paths
that resemble those of Canada and Argentina.
this fits with Barrington Moore's generalizations.
Yoshie:
The state, be it a capitalist state like Japan or a socialist state
like the USSR, has to break the power of big landowners to make
import-substitution industrialization successful.
this was the attitude in Latin America a few decades ago.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
