Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/247021 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
EHES Working Papers in Economic History No. 90
Publisher: 
European Historical Economics Society (EHES), s.l.
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. This paper uses 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. 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 rural markets did not restrict access to land, the government-initiated land redistribution had no clear-cut economic justification.
Subjects: 
land markets
structural change
land prices
landless peasants
JEL: 
N54
N53
Q15
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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