Land redistribution and the South African economy

Abstract

Land redistributive policies can be viewed as effective tools for reducing rural poverty mainly because agriculture continues to be a major source of rural livelihood and a contributor to rural economic growth. For the structural changes and economy-wide impacts, including behavioural changes of rural land distribution, to be assessed and captured through time, a South African Social Accounting Matrix can be used as a database to construct a dynamic computable general equilibrium simulation model to simulate the potential impact on household welfare in South Africa. This study seeks to assess how government redistributive policies may affect household welfare in short- and long-run, focusing on poverty and income distribution in South Africa by applying a dynamic computable general equilibrium microsimulation model. The results showed that rural land distribution increases poor household income through an increase in factor by an average of 0.828. However, for most macroeconomic variables, the impact is negative in the short-run with a gradual increase in the long-run. The results support the claim that rural land distribution coupled with agriculture investment and government support can be effective in improving household welfare.

Faktor Penentu Pemanfaatan Sertifikat Redistribusi Tanah untuk Mengakses Modal: Studi Kasus Kabupaten Pasaman Barat

“…Kegiatan redistribusi tanah dilaksanakan di berbagai negara dan secara umum bertujuan untuk memperbaiki keadaan sosial ekonomi masyarakat dengan membagi tanah pertanian secara adil sekaligus memberikan kepastian hak atas tanah (Mendola & Simtowe, 2015;Mukarati et al, 2020) (Fatimah, 2015).…”

Evaluating Factors Affecting Performance of Land Reform Beneficiaries in South Africa

“…Furthermore, land reform in South Africa is aligned with the neoclassical economics school of thought, which asserts that land is one of the critical factors of production. As such, land redistribution policies are not only necessary but also hold promise for poverty reduction and wealth creation among the rural populace [19].…”

“…The importance of empirical evidence in shaping the land reform policy agenda has long been acknowledged [23] and several strides have been made by a plethora of researchers in a bid to provide the much-needed input for policy formulation [22,24,25]. A significant share of existing literature focuses on evaluating the impact of land reform [19,22,24,26].…”

“…Mukarati et al [19] applied the computable general equilibrium model to investigate the impact of land redistribution policies on welfare, in the short and long-term. Findings from their study reveal that rural land distribution increases rural households' income by, on average, a factor of 0.828.…”

A review of model-based scenario analysis of poverty for informing sustainability

“…Different poverty research topics have been addressed in previous studies (Figure 2c). Most of them (41%) investigated the impacts of socioeconomic activities on poverty from a variety of perspectives, including fiscal policies (e.g., cash transfer program (Gilliland et al, 2019), government redistributive policies (Mukarati et al, 2020;Salotti and Trecroci, 2018), tax reforms (Feltenstein et al, 2017;Llambi et al, 2016), public pension system (Inagaki, 2018), childcare policy (Cockburn et al, 2016)), trade liberalization policies (Liyanaarachchi et al, 2016), financial crises (Antoniades et al, 2020), and public investment adjustments in tourism (Banerjee et al, 2015), energy (Tiberti et al, 2017), and infrastructure (Medeiros et al, 2021). We found that economic growth, trade liberalization, and cash transfer have positive impacts on poverty reduction, in which the cash transfer has a significant impact in the short term, but has a limited role in the long run.…”