Book Chapter
Land Ownership Inequality and the Income Distribution Consequences of Economic Growth

Addresses the question of whether agrarian structure (land ownership inequality) can explain increasing income inequality. The second section begins the chapter with a conventional income inequality accounting or Gini decomposition framework, which, among other things, provides a convenient vehicle to review the economic theory of the inverted‐U, the assumptions under which it could be expected to hold, and, by implication, the likely reasons for its failure to hold in the contemporary world. This framework also makes it clear that the direct explanatory power of land ownership inequality on income inequality should diminish with the reduction in the share of national income generated in the agricultural sector, and should thus be diminishing rapidly over time in those countries of Asia and Latin America where the weight of the agricultural sector in the overall economy has fallen off dramatically. The third section develops an econometric approach for answering this empirical question, in which flexible estimation methods based on random coefficients or mixed effects models are employed to test for the effect of agrarian structure on income inequality. The last section summarizes the chapter by considering the implications for policy both inside and outside the agricultural sector.