Land reform in India
Economic theory, taken alone, doesn't tell you whether land reform is good or bad. So let's take a look at the data, the answer may surprise you, for India at least.
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if land reform does agriculture less efficient, isn't better to tax production and redistribute it to poor people that otherwise could benefit from land reform?
That might be true, given a highly effective government with little overhead/leakage. In places where this would matter though, I find it unlikely that much if any of the retained surplus would reach the poorest.
I think there also might be gains in having people work and earn their wages rather than becoming beneficiaries of government alimony.
hard to tell, since taxes could bring in dead weights and make agriculture less efficient too.
For practice question #2, "_conducted_ tenancy reforms" would make more sense to me than as it is -- without a verb.
I don’t see how changes in urban poverty provide any insight into correlation vs. causation for the impact of land reform on rural poverty. Politics plays a huge role in policy development, and it is not at all unusual to see the advancement of policies that benefit farmers but not the urban poor, or vice versa. (One sees this in the US quite often.) Even if a government were “anti-poverty,” presumably urban and rural poverty would be tackled by different means, which would most likely have variable rates of efficacy. Is it true that in India measures for rural and urban poverty always move in tandem? If not, how can one provide any meaningful disambiguation of the data for the other?
The "good" state governments that legislated tenancy reform might have targeted the rural poor's votes which likely significantly outnumbered the urban poor's votes. The disclaimer that this paper is an attempt at a very difficult topic to study makes sense since the attempts towards causation aren't quite there yet.
This was one of the most pointless and nonsenscial videos so far. And the conclusions are practically tautological. Its also not clear if we were supposed to read the paper or just take your executive summary points as somehow meaningful?
As with any source, independent research is warranted. Healthy skepticism and humility are the two best defenses against confirmation bais. As Stephen Hawking famously said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance…it is the illusion of knowledge.”
The poverty line measures for rural and urban India are quite different, so I wonder too how one can compare both. The latest measures( March 2012) from the Planning Commission are at Rs. 28.35 in urban areas and Rs. 22.42 in rural areas and this announcement caused much debate since these measures lowered the poverty line.