Poverty alleviation through productive efficiency and access to land

Two competing issues, ‘efficiency’ and ‘equity’, are offered in the literature to support land reform as a strategy to alleviate poverty. This book attempts to deal with both of these issues. Firstly, it measures farm level technical efficiency to study the outcome of redistributing land reform as a means of increasing productivity. Secondly, it explores the poverty reducing effects of marginal value of land with regard to consumption and income. Using NLSS III data this book empirically investigates how redistributive land reform might improve productive efficiency, and explores how access to land might reduce poverty. The key finding of the book is that land reform can fulfil both efficiency and equity objectives with certain conditions. An effective implementation of judicious land reform can increase productive efficiency, and access to land for the poor, together with other supportive complementary mechanisms, will increase household consumption and income and thereby alleviate poverty and inequality. However, given the constraints of development, land reform cannot be the only intervention implemented to overcome existing problems. A redistributive land reform policy, accompanied by development of potentially important industries with comparative and competitive advantages, can significantly stimulate economic growth and alleviate poverty and inequality.