The question of land access and the Spanish Land Reform of 1932

Juan Carmona (), Joan Rosés and James Simpson

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Spanish land reform, involving the break-up of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and justified for economic and political reasons. We employ new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930 before the approval of the 1932 Land Reform during the Second Republic (1931-36). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy land plots, and structural change that drained rural population from the countryside. Given that shifts in factor prices were helping workers gain access to land, the economic arguments for reform by the 1930s remain unclear

JEL-codes: J01 N0 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economic History Review, 2, February, 2018. ISSN: 0013-0117

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/84870/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The question of land access and the Spanish land reform of 1932 (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:84870

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().