Abstract
How do agricultural productivity gains affect the distribution of agricultural land? Exploiting three waves of census data from the Philippines covering 21 years and 17 million plots, this article finds that municipalities endowed with favorable soil and weather conditions for genetically modified (GM) corn cultivation experience a relative increase in landholding inequality. Agricultural land is decreasing during this period and this decrease is driven by a decline in the size of large farms. The introduction of GM corn slows down this process by keeping more land under cultivation, which contributes to the documented relative increase in inequality.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 229-250 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | The World Bank Economic Review |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Funding
Ludovic Bequet is a researcher at the University of Namur, Namur, Belgium; his email address is [email protected] . Research on this project was financially supported by the Excellence of Science (EOS) Research project of FNRS O020918F. The author thanks Jean-Marie Baland, Catherine Guirkinger, Benoit Decerf, Matthieu Chemin, Peter Lanjouw, Tanguy Bernard, Marc Sangnier, four anonymous reviewers, and participants at the EEA Conference 2021 and the EOS Annual Workshop 2021 for helpful comments, as well as to Eric Edmonds for his outstanding editorial work. The author also thanks Andres Ignacio and Alberto Marin for their assistance with the data collection and for sharing their work on PSGC codes. A is available with this article at The World Bank Economic Review website.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Excellence of Science | |
| Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS | O020918F |
Keywords
- Land inequality
- agricultural technology
- land reform