IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/eee/hagchp/6-65.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Farm Size

In: Handbook of Agricultural Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Eastwood, Robert
  • Lipton, Michael
  • Newell, Andrew

Abstract

What patterns can be discerned in the distribution of farm sizes across countries and over time? How does the behavior of individual economic agents interact with the natural environment and general economic development to affect farm size? How has concerted human intervention, understood as national and supranational policy actions, altered these outcomes? We find that operated farm size rises with economic development, especially in the 20th century, with marked exceptions: large farms in Latin America and Southern Africa; small farms in parts of Northwest Europe; diminishing farm size in South Asia. Despite increased scale, in many advanced countries the family remains the main source of farm labor. Hired labor supervision costs tend to favor family farming as the equilibrium institution. Theory suggests that the family farm will typically become larger with economic development, but its efficiency advantage over the agroindustrial enterprise will decline. Sufficiently land-augmenting technical advances can upset the relationship between development and equilibrium scale, as in the Green Revolution. Concerted intervention can also cause departures from such equilibria. Colonial land grabs have led to inefficiently large farms, with market forces and land reform subsequently reducing average size after decolonization. Greater land rights have thereby raised the rural poor's income, status, and power, but farmland collectivizations, and much farm tenancy reform, have largely failed to achieve this goal. However, classic land reforms, and some decollectivizations, have proved more incentive-compatible and have distributed large land areas among many small family-managed units. Farm size is, in principle, also affected by net taxes on farm production (mostly negative in OECD, mostly positive in developing countries, though reduced), but such effects remain empirically elusive. Globalization and liberalization--effects via relative prices aside--have induced institutional changes that are not neutral with respect to farm size. These include supermarkets' increased role in the supply chain.

Suggested Citation

  • Eastwood, Robert & Lipton, Michael & Newell, Andrew, 2010. "Farm Size," Handbook of Agricultural Economics, in: Robert Evenson & Prabhu Pingali (ed.), Handbook of Agricultural Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 65, pages 3323-3397, Elsevier.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:hagchp:6-65
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B7P5B-4X49J18-9/2/1d7094d6b8643ac13db4fded0fc4d6b2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cinnirella, Francesco & Hornung, Erik, 2016. "Landownership concentration and the expansion of education," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 135-152.
    2. Scott M. Swinton & Braeden Deynze, 2017. "Hoes to Herbicides: Economics of Evolving Weed Management in the United States," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 29(3), pages 560-574, July.
    3. World Bank, 2017. "Gaining Momentum in Peruvian Agriculture," World Bank Publications - Reports 27517, The World Bank Group.
    4. Karayalcin, Cem, 2016. "Property rights and the first great divergence: Europe 1500–1800," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 484-498.
    5. Carletto, Calogero & Savastano, Sara & Zezza, Alberto, 2013. "Fact or artifact: The impact of measurement errors on the farm size–productivity relationship," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 254-261.
    6. Baten, Joerg & Mumme, Christina, 2013. "Does inequality lead to civil wars? A global long-term study using anthropometric indicators (1816–1999)," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 56-79.
    7. Derek Byerlee & Klaus Deininger, 2013. "The Rise of Large Farms in Land-Abundant Countries: Do They Have a Future?," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Stein T. Holden & Keijiro Otsuka & Klaus Deininger (ed.), Land Tenure Reform in Asia and Africa, chapter 14, pages 333-353, Palgrave Macmillan.
    8. Ellen Aab¯ & Thomas Kring, "undated". "The Political Economy of Large-Scale Agricultural Land Acquisitions: Implications for Food Security and Livelihoods/Employment Creation in Rural Mozambique," UNDP Africa Policy Notes 2012-004, United Nations Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Africa.
    9. Holden, Stein T. & Otsuka, Keijiro, 2014. "The roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in the context of population growth and land use intensification in Africa," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 88-97.
    10. Tian, Qing & Holland, John H. & Brown, Daniel G., 2016. "Social and economic impacts of subsidy policies on rural development in the Poyang Lake Region, China: Insights from an agent-based model," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 148(C), pages 12-27.
    11. Beuchelt, Tina D. & Zeller, Manfred, 2011. "Profits and poverty: Certification's troubled link for Nicaragua's organic and fairtrade coffee producers," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(7), pages 1316-1324, May.
    12. Fałkowski, Jan, 2016. "Promoting change or preserving the status quo? - the consequences of dominating local politics by agricultural interests. Some evidence on structural change in Poland during the transition period," 149th Seminar, October 27-28, 2016, Rennes, France 245115, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    13. repec:oup:erevae:v:44:y:2017:i:4:p:540-566. is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Lowder, Sarah K. & Bertini, Raffaele & Karfakis, Panagiotis & Croppenstedt, Andre, 2016. "Transformation in the size and distribution of farmland operated by household and other farms in select countries of sub-Saharan Africa," 2016 Fifth International Conference, September 23-26, 2016, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 246969, African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE).
    15. Kilic, Talip & Zezza, Alberto & Carletto, Calogero & Savastano, Sara, 2017. "Missing(ness) in Action: Selectivity Bias in GPS-Based Land Area Measurements," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 143-157.
    16. Muyanga, Milu & Jayne, T.S., 2014. "Effects of rising rural population density on smallholder agriculture in Kenya," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 98-113.
    17. Lowder, Sarah K. & Skoet, Jakob & Raney, Terri, 2016. "The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 16-29.
    18. Derek D. Headey, 2016. "The evolution of global farming land: facts and interpretations," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 47(S1), pages 185-196, November.
    19. Dethier, Jean-Jacques & Effenberger, Alexandra, 2012. "Agriculture and development: A brief review of the literature," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 175-205.
    20. Baten, Joerg & Juif, Dácil, 2014. "A story of large landowners and math skills: Inequality and human capital formation in long-run development, 1820–2000," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 375-401.
    21. Rammohan, Anu & Pritchard, Bill, 2014. "The Role of Landholding as a Determinant of Food and Nutrition Insecurity in Rural Myanmar," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 597-608.
    22. Rada, Nicholas & Wang, Chenggang & Qin, Lijian, 2015. "Subsidy or market reform? Rethinking China’s farm consolidation strategy," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 93-103.
    23. Conceição, Pedro & Levine, Sebastian & Lipton, Michael & Warren-Rodríguez, Alex, 2016. "Toward a food secure future: Ensuring food security for sustainable human development in Sub-Saharan Africa," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 1-9.
    24. Jasikowska, Katarzyna & Gorlach, Krzysztof, 2012. "„Czyńcie Sobie Ziemię Poddaną” – Czyli O Różnych Obliczach Ponowoczesnego Rolnictwa Na Przykładzie Procesów Zawłaszczania Ziemi (Land Grabbing) W Skali Świata," Village and Agriculture (Wieś i Rolnictwo), Polish Academy of Sciences (IRWiR PAN), Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development, vol. 4(157).
    25. Voigt, Peter & Wolz, Axel, 2014. "Agro-holdings in Russia: Temporary phenomenon or a prevailing business form?," 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia 182848, European Association of Agricultural Economists.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    farm size; land reform; small farms; family farms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • Q13 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agricultural Markets and Marketing; Cooperatives; Agribusiness
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:hagchp:6-65. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookseriesdescription.cws_home/BS_HE/description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.