Land Ownership and Development: Evidence from Peru

Rural life in much of Latin America was dominated by large landowners well until the 20th century. These landowners sought to keep local peasant populations poor and subservient through wage suppression, restrictions on labor mobility, and repression. They also sought to keep peasant populations uneducated in order to ensure that peasants failed to meet literacy requirements for voting. By eliminating large landowners and enabling new policy initiatives, extensive land reform holds the potential to vastly and directly improve peasant livelihoods, to facilitate human capital formation, and to introduce new services and public goods. This failed to occur in Peru despite a sweeping land reform that redistributed half of all private land to peasants. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits unevenness in land reform implementation as well as age cohort analysis, I show that greater land reform in Peru generated greater poverty and lower rates of educational attainment. This occurred because land reform encouraged rural demographic stasis, widespread land informality and property rights instability, and reduced political competitiveness.

Michael Albertus is an associate professor of political scienceat the University of Chicago. His research interests include politicalregimes and redistribution, regime transitions and stability, politicsunder dictatorship, clientelism, and civil conflict. He has publishedtwo books, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform(2015) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (2018),and a host of articles in outlets such as the American Journal ofPolitical Science, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, andComparative Political Studies. He is currently the interim Directorfor the Center for Latin American Studies.