Access to land and rural poverty in developing countries: theory and evidence from Guatemala

Pablo Bandeira () and Jose Maria Sumpsi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The lack of consensus on the social and economic impact from access to land continues to generate heated political and academic debates. The existing empirical literature does not consider possible opportunity costs, factors that can affect this impact and different time horizons. Toward solving this problem, this article elaborates a theoretical argument on the potential benefits, opportunity costs and asset accumulation dynamics that may derive from gaining access to or increasing the size of rural land in developing countries. Empirical tests of the argument and poverty reduction assessment are then carried out using household data from Guatemala. Finally, policy and future research implications are derived.

Keywords: Access to land; rural poverty; off-farm income; Guatemala (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O12 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13365/1/MPRA_paper_13365.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:13365

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().