On the Brazilian ground-rent appropriated by landowners

Abstract

This paper presents a measurement of the portion of the Brazilian ground-rent appropriated by agrarian landowners during 1955-2005 and assesses its importance relative to other forms of surplus value appropriated in the Brazilian economy. In pursuing this task, the paper also puts forward original estimations of several time-series that are crucial for the study of Brazilian long-term growth and development. Finally, the paper combines the measurements obtained here with those advanced in (Grinberg, 2008, 2013b) to present an approximation to the evolution of the total Brazilian ground-rent during 1955-2005. The appendix presents the sources and methodology used for the estimations.

Wages, Price, and Profit: Protection and Value Capture in the Mercosur Automotive Industry

“…On the other hand, however, these policies never managed to challenge the survival of the landowners as a class. On the contrary, since the beginning of this phase landowners have appropriated as ground rent (excluding the normal profit from agrarian capital) between 2 percent (Argentina) and 3 percent (Brazil) of the GDP (Grinberg, 2015; Iñigo Carrera, 2007). Moreover, with each cyclical contraction of rent landowners were able to impose temporary reversals in the policies of rent recovery, generally epitomized by military governments.…”

‘Backward’ industrialisation in resource-rich countries: The car industry in Uzbekistan

“…cars); and tax exemptions. Specifically, MNC/TNC-affiliates could take advantage of exchange rate overvaluation to gain higher profits upon repatriation and, crucially, to import machinery obsolete for world market production in order to use it for 'backward' domestic production instead (Grinberg, 2015(Grinberg, , 2016.…”

Growth and distribution endogenously determined: a theoretical model and empirical evidence

“…Furthermore, inequality is no longer understood to be a consequence of growth, as in Kuznets' tradition (including dual economy models, such as that of Lewis (1954)), but rather, an important constraint to growth through different channels. In sum, it can be said that the empirical research on the subject can be characterized by three important transitions: 1) from the use of "scanty" cross-sectional data and time series (as Kuznets himself admits), to the completion of "high quality" panel data, such as that achieved by Deininger and Squire (1996), with every time more and more observations that allow for a more complete picture of the problem; 2) from the skimpy concept of income inequality to the more fundamental aspect of asset inequality (commonly using land and human capital inequality as "proxies" to asset inequality, or as variables of an interest for themselves) (i.e., Castelló & Doménech, 2002;Pak Hung Mo, 2003;Fort, 2007;Grinberg, 2015;and Frankema, 2010); and 3) from the understanding of inequality as a consequence of growth, to the view of inequality as an impediment to growth, finding a significant and strong negative relation between asset inequality and economic growth. We build upon this empirical tradition, but we test our theoretical framework in which growth and distribution are simultaneously (endogenously) determined.…”