The question of land access and the Spanish land reform of 1932

Abstract

Spanish land reform, involving the breakup of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and was justified on economic and political grounds. This article employs new provincial data on landless workers, land prices, and agrarian wages to consider whether government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930, before the approval of the 1932 Land reform during the Second Republic (1931–6). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made plots of land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy; and structural change that drained the rural population from the countryside Given that shifts in factor prices were already helping workers gain access to land by the 1930s, the economic arguments for introducing reform at that time remain unclear.

Biological Welfare and Nutritional Inequality in Rural Mediterranean Spain: The Irrigated Area of Valencia, 1859-1939

“… 1 The proportions given by the engineer Pascual Carrión who wrote the first Agricultural Reform Project during the Second Republic, are: small owners 57%, medium owners 27% and large owners 16%, Carrión (1973, p. 107).The data drawn from another recent study confirm the predominance of landowners and tenants in the eastern coastal region of Spain: 55.3% in 1890; 61.9% in 1910; and 73.8% in 1930 (Carmona, et al . 2015). …”

The redistributive effects of pandemics: Evidence on the Spanish flu

“…Both prices have been deflated with a provincial cost-of-living index. We obtain data on real average house prices and real land prices at the province level from Carmona and Rosés (2012) and Carmona et al (2017Carmona et al ( , 2019. From Table 3, we want to emphasize two features.…”

El microcrédito antes de las cooperativas: pósitos y crédito público agrario en España en vísperas de la Gran Guerra

“…La elección de estas provincias se basa en el hecho de que en los tres casos los cereales representan una parte importante de la producción agraria (un 24% de la producción total en 1909-1913 en Cáceres, un 59% en Valladolid y un 49% en Huesca) algo que, a priori, garantiza la abundancia de pósitos (Simpson, 1994: 74-75) 39 . En los tres casos la explotación familiar es el tipo de explotación dominante para este tipo de productos (Carmona, Rosés & Simpson, 2018) 40 . Sin embargo, la distribución de la propiedad ofrece diferencias significativas: en 1930, el 64% de la superficie catastrada de Cáceres estaba concentrada en propiedades de más de 250 hectáreas, y menos del 20% en el caso de Valladolid (Carrión, 1932: 71).…”