The Persistence of Rural Underdevelopment: Evidence from Land Reform in Italy

• Author: Michael Albertus
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221089653
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221089653

Comparative Political Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221089653

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Article

The Persistence of Rural

Underdevelopment:

Evidence from Land

Reform in Italy

Michael Albertus1

Abstract

Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed

and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome

enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This

paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at

rural advancement—land reform—can impact uneven development in the

countryside. It does so in Italy, where a major land reform redistributed

large landholdings to individual peasant families after World War II. Based

on original fine-grained data on land redistribution and a geographical

regression discontinuity analysis that takes advantage of Italy’s zonal

land reform approach, I find that greater land reform fueled comparative

underdevelopment and precarity locally over the long term. Several related

mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition

out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an aging demographic. These

are generalizable mechanisms that could operate in other cases of land

reform beyond Italy.

Keywords

Economic development, land reform, redistribution, economic policy,

European politics

1University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michael Albertus, University of Chicago, 5828 S. University Ave., 401 Pick Hall, Chicago,

IL 60637, USA.

Email: albertus@uchicago.edu

1089653

CPSXXX10.1177/00104140221089653Comparative Political StudiesAlbertus

research-article2022

2023, Vol. 56(1) 65–100

66 Comparative Political Studies 56(1)

Scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of left-behind rural

peripheries in pockets of otherwise highly developed or developing coun-

tries. Economically stagnant rural locales can fuel out-migration, support for

radical policy alternatives, a politics of resentment, lack of confidence in or

even animus toward government, and the formation of place-based identities

that stem from perceptions of deprivation (e.g., Cramer 2016, Gidron & Hall,

2017; Lehoucq, 2012).

A number of countries marked by these poorer rural areas have struggled

historically to overcome enormous disparities in economic structure and well-

being within the national territory. One important policy aimed at this transfor-

mation is land reform. Major land reforms that entail the large-scale

redistribution of land have alone affected more than 1.5 billion people over the

last century (Albertus, 2015). Countries such as Italy, Portugal, Chile, and

South Korea launched large land reform programs in the second half of the

20th century that sought to level rural social and economic opportunities.

Numerous other countries today, such as Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, and

South Africa have sizeable land reform programs that aim to redress historical

injustices linked to land appropriation and broadly advance rural welfare.

But patchiness in rural development remains a feature of many of these

countries. There are many plausible factors behind this pattern, such as indus-

trialization, trade and infrastructure policies, and globalization. However,

uneven development patterns are even present in areas that governments

have sought to transform directly. This suggests training a focus on the con-

sequences of rural policies themselves.

This paper provides one of the first empirical analyses of the developmen-

tal consequences of land reform using local-level land transfer data. It does

so in a major case of late land reform in the West: land reform that occurred

in Italy just after World War II. This was a prominent land reform viewed as

key to uprooting communism and modernizing backward parts of Italy. The

land reform had the support of the United States and other Western govern-

ments that believed large land ownership in Italy was a destabilizing force

that had underpinned support for fascism and then served as a rallying cry for

a snowballing worker’s movement.

I find that rather than rapidly advancing social and economic progress,

land reform in Italy actually fueled underdevelopment locally. The analysis

focuses on one of Italy’s largest land reform regions—the Maremma—that

was located in central Italy. The delineation of the Maremma land reform

zone led some municipalities to become targets of land reform by the central

government and left otherwise similar, neighboring municipalities untouched.

I utilize a geographic regression discontinuity design to empirically iden-

tify the consequences of land reform exposure on development outcomes

Albertus 67

decades later. Areas that experienced greater land reform are comparatively

more underdeveloped today than otherwise similar areas that experienced

less land reform. The approach in this paper is similar to the pre-existing

work by Caprettini et al. (2021) who use a geographic discontinuity approach

to examine the political consequences of Italy’s land reform for the Christian

Democratic party that ruled at the time of the land reform. These authors also

focus on the Maremma zone as well as Delta Podano, a reform zone in north-

ern Italy.1

Several related mechanisms appear to have delayed development in places

subjected to land reform: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor

mobility, and an aging demographic. These are generalizable mechanisms

that could have operated in other cases of land reform aside from Italy.

Further analyses cast doubt on several alternative explanations for the find-

ings. These include pre-land reform differences in well-being, distortionary

economic effects deriving from central government transfers, the possibility

that residual large landholding and surviving brokerage networks may have

driven underdevelopment, changing dynamics in economic sectors other than

agriculture, and shifting investment to just outside the land reform zone.

The findings suggest a provocative and counterintuitive lesson: that the

modern roots of underdevelopment in parts of the countryside lie not only in

historical landholding but also in the policy solutions to that landholding in

the form of land reform. In other words, land reform can contribute to the

political roots of economic stagnation and a stalled rural–urban transforma-

tion. The final section of the paper provides a discussion of where these find-

ings may generalize.

Land Reform and Development

High landholding inequality was a defining feature in most countries until the

last century. Feudalism and colonial settlement patterns allocated enormous

tracts of land to a small slice of powerful rural landowners. Landholding

concentration persisted and remained politically salient well into the 20th

century in most of Latin America, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, and

East and South Asia. In these regions, smallholders, tenant farmers, and wage

laborers faced onerous restrictions to movement (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992),

choices of labor allocation (Albertus, 2017), the ability to access education

(Galor et al., 2009), and the ability to accumulate land and to save and invest

(Lipton, 2009).

Most scholars attribute sluggish development in inegalitarian rural econo-

mies at least in part to the pathologies of large landholding. Large landowners

that command vast and uneducated labor pools can drive down rural wages