Leaving the “Fourth Shoreâ€: The Effect of Italian Farmers’ Expulsions from Post-Colonial Libya, 1930-2005

Mattia Bertazzini

No 20570, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: I study the effect of the expulsion of skilled farmers on the agricultural sector by looking at 20th century Libya. Numerous Italian farms were established in colonial Libya during the the 1920s and 30s. These were expropriated and Italian landowners expelled in two steps: from Cyrenaica (East) in 1942, and from Tripolitania (West) in 1970. I employ a triple difference design on a newly assembled district-level dataset to study the effect of these expulsions on the agricultural sector. The removal of Italian farmers led to a reduction in the level of commercialization and a return to the production of lower value, traditional field crops of affected districts. When market incentives were high, indigenous cultivators responded with a labor-intensive increase in traditional grains production. The available evidence points to a drop in human capital, agricultural knowledge and modern farming practices as the main mechanism behind the effect.

Keywords: expulsions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N57 O1 O13 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
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