IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/18464.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Persistent Specialization and Growth: The Italian Land Reform

Author

Listed:
  • Bianchi-Vimercati, Riccardo
  • Lecce, Giampaolo
  • Magnaricotte, Matteo

Abstract

Land distribution has ambiguous effects on structural transformation: large landowners can slow industrialization by limiting the provision of education, but larger scale and local market power might accelerate the mechanization of production. We examine the effects of redistribution following the Italian 1950 land reform by exploiting novel fine-grained data and find that redistribution led to less industrialization. Agricultural specialization persisted for at least 50 years, consistent with models and data on occupational inheritance. Analysis of several channels highlights the importance of scale reduction and agglomeration. Finally, we show that expropriated areas had lower growth during 1970-2000.

Suggested Citation

  • Bianchi-Vimercati, Riccardo & Lecce, Giampaolo & Magnaricotte, Matteo, 2023. "Persistent Specialization and Growth: The Italian Land Reform," CEPR Discussion Papers 18464, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18464
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP18464
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

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

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic growth; Structural change; Land reform;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N14 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: 1913-
    • O4 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity
    • 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:cpr:ceprdp:18464. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    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.