The Persistence of Rural Underdevelopment: Evidence from Land Reform in Italy.

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural advancement—land reform—can impact uneven development in the countryside. It does so in Italy, where a major land reform redistributed large landholdings to individual peasant families after World War II. Based on original fine-grained data on land redistribution and a geographical regression discontinuity analysis that takes advantage of Italy's zonal land reform approach, I find that greater land reform fueled comparative underdevelopment and precarity locally over the long term. Several related mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an aging demographic. These are generalizable mechanisms that could operate in other cases of land reform beyond Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Political Studies is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)