Thanks for writing this; I really enjoy reading new detailed research on economic proposals like this, and I think How Asia Works is a very interesting book.
However, I must say I was a little confused by the structure of this report. The Summary and Funding Opportunities sections make you sound relatively positive to land expropriation, with the major problem being its lack of political tractability:
We think that if land redistribution were done well, it could be a high impact intervention for kickstarting growth. Our pessimism mainly comes from our belief that redistribution of the kind described in Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works is intractable.
But then reading the text in detail you raise a lot of specific objections, which seem like they would dramatically reduce the impact of the reform, or even drive it negative:
Lack of plausible theory for why large landlords would not be incentivised to make productive investments.
Large farms empirically more productive than smaller farms, even though the farm sizes you consider are still well below what a US farmer would consider economic.
Given these facts, it seems somewhat plausible to me that opposing land redistribution could be a valuable activity (though I agree it is unlikely to be GiveWell-competative), and hence jumping to suggestions about where to implement land redistribution, and which groups to fund, seems premature.
Another issue is the historical failures of land redistribution. Studwell effectively cherry-picks a small group of very similar countries to determine that land expropriation is good, without considering other parts of the world where it has been quite bad. I don’t see how you can seriously evaluate land redistribution without considering examples like Zimbabwe, which saw increased violence, decreased production and increased poverty as a result of their expropriation of land from large white farmers. These policies pose a significant risk of corruption and cronyism, and this cannot be ignored in our evaluation. Many other parts of Africa and South America also tried similar policies, with much worse outcomes than those highlighted in the book. If a policy has performed badly over most of the world, except for East Asians, an ethnic group who do extremely well in other regards (e.g. the success of East Asian immigrants to the US), this seems to suggest that the policy was not the crucial factor.
Similarly, other countries have succeeded without such redistribution. You gesture at this here:
Land equality is certainly not a sufficient condition for transformational economic growth; we suspect it is not a necessary condition either.
but I think it’s worth being a bit more explicit about this: the majority of countries that have seen transformational economic growth have not had anything close to ‘Land equality’. Indeed, in some cases like the UK, government policy was explicitly promoting a less egalitarian model of land use through enclosing the commons to benefit larger landholders.
Thanks for writing this; I really enjoy reading new detailed research on economic proposals like this, and I think How Asia Works is a very interesting book.
However, I must say I was a little confused by the structure of this report. The Summary and Funding Opportunities sections make you sound relatively positive to land expropriation, with the major problem being its lack of political tractability:
But then reading the text in detail you raise a lot of specific objections, which seem like they would dramatically reduce the impact of the reform, or even drive it negative:
Lack of plausible theory for why large landlords would not be incentivised to make productive investments.
Large farms empirically more productive than smaller farms, even though the farm sizes you consider are still well below what a US farmer would consider economic.
Given these facts, it seems somewhat plausible to me that opposing land redistribution could be a valuable activity (though I agree it is unlikely to be GiveWell-competative), and hence jumping to suggestions about where to implement land redistribution, and which groups to fund, seems premature.
Another issue is the historical failures of land redistribution. Studwell effectively cherry-picks a small group of very similar countries to determine that land expropriation is good, without considering other parts of the world where it has been quite bad. I don’t see how you can seriously evaluate land redistribution without considering examples like Zimbabwe, which saw increased violence, decreased production and increased poverty as a result of their expropriation of land from large white farmers. These policies pose a significant risk of corruption and cronyism, and this cannot be ignored in our evaluation. Many other parts of Africa and South America also tried similar policies, with much worse outcomes than those highlighted in the book. If a policy has performed badly over most of the world, except for East Asians, an ethnic group who do extremely well in other regards (e.g. the success of East Asian immigrants to the US), this seems to suggest that the policy was not the crucial factor.
Similarly, other countries have succeeded without such redistribution. You gesture at this here:
but I think it’s worth being a bit more explicit about this: the majority of countries that have seen transformational economic growth have not had anything close to ‘Land equality’. Indeed, in some cases like the UK, government policy was explicitly promoting a less egalitarian model of land use through enclosing the commons to benefit larger landholders.