Description:
This book is about inequality in agriculture. It analyzes the interconnection between inequality and rural factor markets. Its scope
is the intersection of agriculture and inequality. It investigates the
effectiveness and efficiency of land and labor markets in spreading
economic opportunities within agriculture and, thereby, in reducing
rural poverty and inequality using Turkey as a case study. Therefore,
the core theme in this book is the “connectedness” 1 between land
ownership inequality and how markets mediate economic opportunities to people. The main issue we focus on is how existing inequalities
perpetuate inequalities through markets, and limit markets’ ability to
function well, that is to distribute economic opportunities to those
who are efficient producers. The main argument is that rural factor markets are prone to reproducing initial inequalities rather than
redressing them because of existing inequalities in land—and thereby
power as land begets political and economic power. In addition, economic and social determinants of participation in tenancy and labor
markets are analyzed as they are affected by landownership inequality. This book distinguishes itself from the existing literature on rural
markets inequality nexus by being one of the very few studies that
provides empirical evidence using micro household data, and also by
providing a unique index to measure the extent of how well markets distribute economic opportunities. Moreover, it is one of the
few studies that look at the causes of rural inequality not only as an
outcome of malfunctioning markets but as a reason of the process
itself that creates inequality. Last but not least, another important
contribution of the book is the fact that, one of the backbone chapters of the book, the section where we look at allocative efficiency in
Turkish agriculture by testing for an inverse size-yield relationship
across farms, is the first and only existing study on Turkey.