Land Reform in Developing Countries

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 of the book.
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 reviews the experience with different types of policies, variously labelled as land reform. They ask: are these genuine land reforms in the sense of seeking, and moving towards, "farmland-based reduction of gross, unearned inequality and hence of poverty"? These main types of land reform are:
Chapter 7 reviews the persistent allegation that land reform is dead, or was so effectively avoided that it never lived. Lipton asks the questions: Where has it happened on the ground, how much and when? He also asks: Is land reform still happening and where it is not dead, ought it to be? Lipton concludes: "In many developing countries, land reform is a live, often burning, issue ... The debate about land reform is alive and well."
Criticisms.
The book overall received positive reviews and endorsements (see below). However, Andrew Dorward did have some "minor gripes" within his very positive review. He wished that it did not finish so abruptly and that it had a final chapter "summing up the main lessons from the book for the next generation of researchers, analysts and practitioners in the field." He would also have liked to have seen "more explicit attention to interactions of land reform with gender and the environment."
Abhijit Sen, while giving it an overall positive review, found that:
He also finished his review with some further critiques, especially in relation to land reform in India:
Endorsements.
The book received positive endorsements from a wide range of authors, including Jeffrey Sachs, Nicholas Stern, Amartya Sen, Gordon Conway, Nancy Birdsall, Paul Collier, Akin Adesina and Pramod K. Mishra.