In the land-abundant European and most of the Central Asian CIS countries, little restructuring had taken place, substantial property rights reforms had failed to materialize, and both output and productivity indicators had plummeted into an ever deeper trough. They observed even stronger growth in East Asia, where the property rights reform of the Household Responsibility System in China alone had created millions of family farms.Ĭompared to these two groups of countries, the reform results in the Soviet successors known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) were dismal. After the first transition decade, Swinnen and Rozelle ( 2006) documented how land restitution, the rise of land rental and the recapitalization of large farms had spurred notable productivity growth in Central and Eastern European agriculture. In the years to come, highly varying privatization and reform policies across the region turned the set of post-socialist countries into a laboratory of farm restructuring. Based on the perceived superiority of family-led operations with regard to technical, allocative and innovative efficiency, international advisors recommended to split up (“individualize”) the former collectives into private family farms, to thus return control and ownership rights to producers, improve their incentives to elicit more effort and reduce the operational size of farming units (World Bank 1992, pp. Many Western economists considered the family farm, such as portrayed in Kislev and Peterson ( 1982), as the natural benchmark for reform. Land privatization and the creation of land sales and rental markets emerged as contentious political issues (Pryor 1992). Widely considered as overstaffed, inefficient and import-dependent, the post-Soviet food economy also drew on vast resources of crop and pasture land, thus alluring investors with an eye on rising domestic demand and export opportunities. In the decades to follow, policymakers, analysts as well as farm managers and rural workers would struggle with restructuring the former collectives into alternative farming models considered fit for the envisaged market economy.īefore its ultimate demise, Soviet agriculture provided income to more than one quarter of the workforce, much more than in Western market economies (Lerman et al. From the Baltic countries to Central Asia and the Far East, the socialist era bequeathed its collective and state farms to the newly independent states. In the agricultural sector, the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed open an arena of reform debate and restructuring policies that has not closed 30 years later.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |