Land reform, poverty reduction, and growth: Evidence from India

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in relationships between redistribution, growth, and welfare. Land reforms in developing countries a re often aimed at improving the poor's access to land, although their effec tiveness has often been hindered by political constraints on implementation . In this paper we use panel data on the sixteen main Indian states from 19 58 to 1992 to consider whether the large volume of legislated land reforms have had an appreciable impact on growth and poverty. We argue that such la nd reforms have been associated with poverty reduction.