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Measures, such as the division of large properties into smaller ones, that are taken to bring about a more equitable apportionment of agricultural land.
landreform land'-re·form' (lănd'rĭ-fôrm') adj.A sweeping change in land tenure. It usually involves the breaking-up of large estates and the widespread redistribution of the land into smallholdings, but may also be land consolidation. The redistribution of land is a complex, and slow, business; for example, the process began in South Africa in 1994, but by the end of 2001 less than 1% of formerly white-owned land had been transferred to the black population (
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The concept of agrarian reform refers to changes implemented in the agricultural economy, changes designed broadly to improve agricultural performance and notably to contribute to the process of economic growth and economic development. The concept of reform implies changes to an existing system or policies, though the interpretation of change and the precise boundaries of the agricultural sector are general and broad. Thus characterized, agrarian reform has been a continuing and important component of the Russian economic experience. Moreover, the nature of agrarian reform has been closely associated with the differing stages of Russian economic development and with the role envisioned for the agrarian economy in the process of industrialization and modernization.
Russia has been an agrarian economy since its beginnings. For this reason, changes in the agrarian economy have been central to any discussion of economic growth and economic development in Russia. Beginning in the era of serfdom and the existence of a premodern agriculture, the focus has been on the nature of agrarian reform necessary to contribute to modernization.
The nature of agrarian reform necessarily depends heavily on the time period considered. In the Russian case, a convenient turning point is 1861, the date of the Emancipation Act, the purpose of which was to eliminate serfdom. Prior to this date, the Russian rural economy was feudal in character, with serfs bound to their landlords, communal landholding, and periodic redistribution of land plots.
Although the Emancipation Act was judicial more than economic in character, it nevertheless introduced a long period of agrarian reform through the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During this period, there was gradual reallocation of land, although preservation of the village (mir) as a communal form of local decision making limited the extent to which the modernization of agriculture could take place. Peasant mobility was limited, a major reason for political instability in the early 1900s and the implementation of the Stolypin reforms, a series of changes designed to break the communal system, to change land usage, and to introduce individual peasant farming.
The agrarian reform, prior to the Bolshevik revolution, has been the subject of controversy. The traditional agrarian crisis view has supported a negative view of the Russian rural economy, while the revisionist view argues that output and structural changes during the late tsarist era were directionally important for the ultimate development of a modern agricultural sector.
It is perhaps ironic that by the 1920s and the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the rural economy would again be at the forefront of attention. Specifically, the focus would be the potential role of agriculture in Soviet economic development. After extensive discussion and experimentation during the NEP, Stalin forcibly changed the institutional arrangements on Soviet agriculture beginning in 1928. The introduction of the collective farms (the kohlkoz), the state farms (the sovkhoz) and the private subsidiary sector fundamentally changed the manner in which agriculture was organized. Markets were replaced by state control.
Although these changes remained in effect through the end of the Soviet era, there were important changes made in the rural economy during the Soviet years. In effect, there was a continuing search for optimal organizational arrangements. This search led to important changes in the mechanization of agriculture (especially the introduction of the Machine Tractor Stations), the nature of land use (amalgamation of farms seeking scale advantages and the conversion of collective to state farms) and the relations between the state and the farm units in terms of deliveries, financing, and the like. Most important, in the latter years of the Soviet era, the focus became agro-industrial integration, an effort to reap the benefits of Western "agri-business" types of arrangements for production and marketing of agricultural products.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the era of socialist agriculture and socialist agricultural policies came to an end. Much less attention was paid to the rural economy; it was not central to the Russian approach to transition, and yet agrarian reform was once again on the agenda. Throughout the 1990s, the emphasis has been the creation of a corporate (share) structure in farms and the conversion of these farms to various forms of private equity arrangements. However, given the very slow emergence of land reform, and specifically the slow development of a land market in Russia, fundamental change in the Russian rural economy continues to be at best very slow.
Bibliography
Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—ROBERT C. STUART
History
Agrarian reform has been a recurrent theme in history. The Greek and Roman eras were filled with violent struggles between landowners and the landless. The land reform issue was a major factor in the Gracchian agrarian laws. During the Middle Ages, demands for land reform triggered peasant rebellions, including the Peasants' Revolt in England led by John Ball and Wat Tyler in 1381 and the German Peasants' War of 1524–26.
Russia
In the 20th cent. the Russian Revolution added a new dimension to agrarian reform—the socialization of agriculture (i.e., the collective ownership of all land partly through state farming, but mainly through collective farming under state control) as a prerequisite for attaining communism. Driven in part by the peasant's desire for land, Lenin, shortly after assuming power, decreed (1917) all land as state property. Landed estates were seized by peasants, resulting in approximately 25 million peasant holdings. His government's promotion of voluntary collectivization was ineffective, however, and after 1929 Stalin forced collectivization at an estimated cost of ten million lives. After World War II, the Eastern European nations under Communist rule implemented agrarian reforms following the Soviet model. Since the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (1989–90) and the disintegration of the Soviet Union (1991) there has been movement, sometimes successful, sometimes fitful, toward privatization of agriculture in the former republics of the USSR.
China
China's Communist revolution in 1949 led, after the wholesale transfer of land to small peasants, to the amalgation of peasant cooperatives into larger communes (1958). An attempt to establish socialist agriculture prior to mechanization, the communes were much criticized by the Soviet Union. They proved inefficient, causing stagnation in agricultural productivity, and China later abolished them. By 1980 China was rapidly returning land to individual smallholders and promoting market-oriented agriculture with marked success.
In Other Parts of the World
In Asia, especially in such densely populated areas as the Indian subcontinent, agitation has been mainly for redistribution among landless laborers; for security of tenure; and for the elimination of middlemen, oppressive rents, and usurious interest. Agrarian reforms began in Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), when feudal fiefs and stipends were abolished. After World War II, U.S. occupation forces supervised further land reform. As a result, by 1949 over 80% of Japan's tenanted land had been transferred from absentee landlords to tenant cultivators. In India and Pakistan similar programs of agrarian reform were attempted, with less success (see Bhave, Vinoba).
In S Africa, where racial policies resulted in discriminatory land policies in Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, majority rule in the late 20th cent. led to pressure for land redistribution. In Zimbabwe, wholesale land redistribution at the end of the 1900s resulted in near collapse of the country's commercial agriculture when land was transferred from white farmers to blacks who had little farming experience and inadequate equipment. Land reform has proceeded more gradually in Namibia and South Africa, resulting in greater frustration on the part of the landless but less significant decreases in agricultural production.
Latin America and Africa
In South America land reform is a major problem because enormous tracts of land (latifundios) are concentrated in very few hands with laborers no better off than serfs. Although the revolution in Mexico resulted in land reform (1917), the program of redistribution of land is still only partially completed. A land reform law also followed the Bolivian revolution of 1952, but by 1970 only 45% of the peasant families had received titles to land. One of the most complete agrarian reforms in Latin America has taken place in Cuba, where land reform was one of the main platforms of the revolution of 1959. Large holdings were expropriated by the National Institute for Land Reform (INRA), but most is managed by government officials and has not been redistributed. The remaining agricultural land is limited to a ceiling with tenants gaining ownership rights. Nicaragua's agrarian reform under the Sandinistas resulted in expropriation of some large holdings (1979), which after initial collectivization has been progressively redistributed to individual farmers, including returning Contras after 1989. Chile's land reform (1970–73) was reversed when Socialist Salvador Allende was overthrown.
African agrarian reforms have included distribution of excess land (Algeria, 1971); nationalization of all land (Ethiopia, 1974); and abolition of all land titles to be replaced by rights of occupancy (Tanzania, Zambia and Nigeria). Tanzania promoted farming collectives (ujamaa) with limited success.
Bibliography
See D. Ghai and S. Radwan, ed., Agrarian Policies and Rural Poverty in Africa (1983); C. C. Geisler and F. J. Popper, ed., Land Reform, American Style (1984); M. R. Ghonemy, Studies in Agrarian Reform and Rural Poverty (1984); J. D. Montgomery, International Dimensions of Land Reform (1984); J. P. Polwelson, The Story of Land (1987) and The Present Betrayed (1989); J. M. Reidinger, Land Reform and Democratic Development (1987); D. Christodoulou, The Unpromised Land (1989); W. Hinton, The Great Reversal: Privatization of China (1990).
Land tenure refers to the relationships, rules, and institutions that define rights of ownership in, and access to, landed property.
Land reform generally denotes government measures designed for a relatively equitable redistribution of agricultural land, but actual reform measures can reflect a range of ideological positions. The political nature of reform is difficult to avoid given the effect of changes in land tenure arrangements on the social relations and hierarchies they embody.
The distribution of property rights is a key indicator of the relationship between state and society, as well as a fundamental determinant of production and distribution. While a wide range of land tenure systems have worked themselves out across the modern Middle East, three phases in the changing relationship between state and society can usefully be highlighted where landed property is concerned. The early phase begins during the nineteenth century when centralizing state structures, colonial rule, and the emergence of global capitalism and market forces often concentrated property rights in relatively few hands. A second phase emerged in the post - World War II period when governments, often coming to power as anticolonial national independence movements, implemented ambitious programs to develop agriculture, redistribute land to middle-class or smaller farmers, and substitute state-supervised cooperatives and monopolies for private marketing networks. A third phase may be discerned in which states have, since the 1980s, repositioned themselves in the economy and, under local and international pressure, retreated to various degrees from direct intervention in agriculture.
In pursuit of fiscal and administrative goals toward which modern states typically aspire, the Ottoman state and its successors, the European-dominated colonial administrations in the Middle East, were determined to make more legible the complexity of local, often communal, landholding patterns and to pursue the standardization and individualization of title to land. The land register and the cadastral map were the instruments that best reflected the new centralized, unmediated reality officially sought by the state. Utilitarian arguments in favor of private property were commonly put forth. For example, in societies that were overwhelmingly agricultural and where land was the principal factor of production, tax collection could be facilitated by the individualization of rights. Further, it was widely assumed that unless individual users knew they would capture the benefits of investment and conservation, degradation and overuse of resources would ensue. As a wealth-creating institution, the promise of individualized property rights, particularly in the colonial period, was that resources would naturally find their way through the market into the hands of those individuals who value them most. In colonies of settlement - Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Palestine - a market in land also obviously facilitated the transfer of native property to European immigrants who mainly accumulated large estates. Moreover, by asserting in philosophical terms that private property constituted the basis of civilization, European colonial officials could point to the evidence of communally or tribally held property in a colonized territory as demonstration of the necessity of imperial rule.
Subject to such pressures and interests, a variety of landholding patterns emerged. The critical variables appear to have been the considerable ecological diversity and the will or the capacity of the state to control relations at the local level. For example, in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, in Thrace and those areas of Anatolia close to Istanbul, small-scale farming became the norm. By contrast, in the more remote areas of the empire, such as Eastern Anatolia or Syria, the need to rely on local intermediaries for administration created a highly skewed distribution of land. In some cases, the local governor played a central role: Across the provinces of Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra, Midhat Paşa initiated a process whereby cultivators of land were granted title deeds that secured virtually complete rights of ownership (although, in tribal areas, cultivators were often turned into tenant farmers when the name of the most powerful individual was placed on the title deed). In Ottoman Palestine large estates came into being once new land laws and modern registration procedures created the opportunity to benefit from the increasing foreign demand for agricultural products by purchasing vast tracts of land on paper.
European colonialism could have a profound impact on land tenure patterns. In Algeria, the best farmland was seized by French colonists, who forced the indigenous population onto marginal land or dispossessed them. This pattern of concentration under colonialism prevailed elsewhere. In Egypt a highly unequal distribution of ownership placed tremendous political and economic power into the hands of those few families who dominated rural areas. During the British mandate over Iraq, the administration came to rely heavily on intermediaries and, rather than seek direct contacts with all landowners, in fact strengthened the position of large landowners vis-à-vis small owners and tenant farmers: By 1932 only 10 percent of government revenues were derived from land taxes (as compared to 25 percent in 1921). In Iraq one of the region's (and the world's) most unequal land distributions was thereby created: By 1953, 1.7 percent of the land-holders had 63 percent of the land; 75 percent of the population was landless. The impact of European imperialism on land tenure relationships varied, however, across the Middle East, the transformation often being dependent on the role played by local power structures and interests. In Transjordan British efforts to settle individual title to land overlapped with patterns on the ground.
Sharecropping was the most common method of farming, though estates in Egypt and the Maghrib relied on more direct management by the landowner or his representative. During the first half of
the twentieth century, rural conditions deteriorated and landlessness was implicated in a number of problems: urbanization, high birth rates, low productivity, and lack of purchasing power. Meanwhile, large landlords enjoyed wide powers under the direct or indirect influence of European powers. In the post - World War II period, land reform - responding generally to the widespread call, "land to the tiller" - was adopted by newly independent governments to tackle socioeconomic inequities. While improvements flowing from land reform have been difficult to measure, the political goal of eliminating the power of large landowners has generally been regarded as successful. Countries experiencing significant land reforms during this phase include Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Iran, and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.
Egypt
The pioneering attempts at land reform here progressively lowered the legal limitation of ownership size from 200 feddans (1.038 acres) in 1952 to 50 in 1969. Those who received land, whether through reform or "distress sales" of the wealthy, were rarely the poorest rural people. Direct beneficiaries were either the year-round workers of the estates - not the landless seasonal workers - or members of the rural middle class who could afford to purchase land made available. The reforms also controlled rents and, by making it nearly impossible to evict tenants, ceded property rights to them. Remarkably, output did not fall: The government created a system of supervised agricultural cooperatives that allowed for economies of scale, took over marketing functions, and facilitated the application of inputs such as improved seed and credit. These cooperatives were also used by government to extract part of the agricultural surplus by manipulating the terms of trade. Egypt was in this way transformed into a country of predominantly small farms. Farms under five feddans covered roughly 66 percent of the land area in 1975, but by the early 1980s the share of small farms had fallen to 52 percent, largely as a result of the consolidation of the very smallest farms.
Syria and Iraq
Both countries attempted to follow the Egyptian model despite the very different conditions prevailing. Much larger areas of land were appropriated than in Egypt, the agroecologies were enormously varied (again, in contrast to Egypt where virtually all land was irrigated), stronger resistance was met, and there were far fewer trained officials. Output fell considerably. Although the Syrian and Iraqi governments found it relatively easy to expropriate land, they found it difficult to redistribute it and to take over the marketing functions. Only in the 1970s were Baʿthist governments able to redistribute land and to create fully functioning cooperatives.
Algeria
When European colonial farmers hastily abandoned large farms at the time of independence (1962), employees on many estates tried to manage them collectively. So-called autogestion was immediately championed by politicians, but eventually proved economically counterproductive. Pressure grew and in 1972 the government began attempts to expropriate all private farmland that exceeded the area a family could directly exploit. Agrarian reform encountered considerable resistance and evasion. By 1980, about 13 percent of the arable land had moved into the reform sector, but economic growth was disappointing compared to private farm production.
Tunisia
Reform here went through three stages. From 1956 to 1960 holders of usufruct rights (legal rights to use and profit from property owned by another) were transformed into owners. In 1961 the state began to acquire land formerly held by European colonialists, and a "cooperativization" program was launched, aimed at incorporating the surrounding small farms. Local resistance, poor investment policies, the cessation of World Bank funding, social conflict, and uncertainty about property rights all took their toll on agricultural production. By the end of 1969, cooperativization was abandoned, and the private sector was increasingly relied upon.
Iran
Beginning in 1962 landlords were required to sell to the government any land in excess of "one village." A second phase gave landlords options, such as forming "corporations" with their former tenants and distributing shares rather than land, leasing land for cash, and so on. The "farm corporation" concept, however, was unpopular with peasants; it often led to small farmers selling out to larger ones. Further, landless agricultural workers were excluded from the reform, and many, perhaps most, of the recipients of land received too little to support a family. The reforms also adversely affected the land and water rights of Islamic charities. During the 1970s the shah's government became increasingly obsessed with promoting large farms and agribusinesses. These were mostly unsuccessful and survived only thanks to massive state subsidies. After the Iranian Revolution (1979), in the early days of the Islamic republic, considerable amounts of land changed hands as Pahlavi officials were expropriated, peasants occupied land, and local religious officials took advantage of opportunities. A long debate in the majles (legislature) has since ensued about the legality and the desirability of further land reform, but Muslim jurists have reached competing conclusions regarding the compatibility of such measures with the basic principles of shariʿa.
(Former) People's Democratic Republic of Yemen
In 1968 land reform was implemented after independence. Previously, most farmers were tenants; the rulers, merchants, and religious institutions owned most of the land. Land was redistributed to private farmers, some 65 percent of whom were organized into cooperatives. About 23 percent of all cropped land was held as state farms.
Since the 1980s governments have increasingly withdrawn from direct management of agriculture. Expanding reliance on the private sector in both farm production and marketing, as well as on reduced regulation of farm prices, is visible today in many of the countries in the region. In Egypt, for example, landowners are for the first time since 1952 permitted to evict tenants. In large part, such liberalization measures have resulted from unhappiness with the sluggish performance of state farming and from the prevailing conventional wisdom in favor of foreign direct investment and international trade. However, social inequities can be expected to grow, at least in the short run, and free-market reforms will likely require various forms of political repression as increased levels of popular opposition are confronted.
Bibliography
Fischbach, Michael. State, Society, and Land in Jordan. Boston and Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2000.
Gerber, Haim. The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner; London: Mansell, 1987.
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics,Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Mundy, Martha. "Village Land and Individual Title: Musha and Ottoman Land Registration in the Ajlun District." In Village, Steppe and State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan, edited by Eugene L. Rogan and Tariq Tell. New York and London: British Academic Press, 1994.
Owen, Roger, and Pamuk, Sevket. A History of Middle EastEconomies in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Ruedy, John. Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of aNation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Warriner, Doreen. Land Reform and Development in the MiddleEast: A Study of Egypt, Syria and Iraq; Issued Under the Auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2d edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
— ALAN R. RICHARDS
UPDATED BY MARTIN BUNTON
Land reforms (also agrarian reform, though that can have a broader meaning) is an often-controversial alteration in the societal arrangements whereby government administers possession and use of land. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed real estate property redistribution, generally of agricultural land, or be part of an even more revolutionary program that may include forcible removal of an existing government that is seen to oppose such reforms.
Throughout history, popular discontent with land-related institutions has been one of the most common factors in provoking revolutionary movements and other social upheavals. To those who labor upon the land, the landowner's privilege of appropriating a substantial portion —in some cases half or even more— of production without making a commensurate contribution to production may seem a rank injustice. Consequently, land reform most often refers to transfer from ownership by a relatively small number of wealthy (or noble) owners with extensive land holdings (e.g. plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfer of ownership may be with or without consent or compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land. The land value tax advocated by Georgists is a moderate, market-based version of land reform.
This definition is somewhat complicated by the issue of state-owned collective farms. In various times and places, land reform has encompassed the transfer of land from ownership — even peasant ownership in smallholdings — to government-owned collective farms; it has also, in other times and places, referred to the exact opposite: division of government-owned collective farms into smallholdings. The common characteristic of all land reforms is modification or replacement of existing institutional arrangements governing possession and use of land.
The variety of land reform derives from the variety of land ownership and tenure. Among the possibilities are:
In addition, there is paid agricultural labor — under which someone works the land in exchange for money, payment in kind, or some combination of the two — and various forms of collective ownership. The latter typically takes the form of membership in a cooperative, or shares in a corporation, which owns the land (typically by fee simple or its equivalent, but possibly under other arrangements). There are also various hybrids: in many communist states, government ownership of most agricultural land has combined in various ways with tenure for farming collectives.
Additionally there are, and have been, well-defined systems where neither land nor the houses people live in are their personal property (Statare, as defined in Scandinavia).
The peasants or rural agricultural workers who are usually the intended primary beneficiaries of a land reform may be, prior to the reform, members of failing collectives, owners of inadequate small plots of land, paid laborers, sharecroppers, serfs, even slaves or effectively enslaved by debt bondage.
Land reform policies are generally advocated as an effort to eradicate food insecurity and rural poverty,[1] often with Utilitarian (i.e., "the greatest good for the greatest number"), philosophical or religious arguments (see Jubilee), a right to dignity, or a simple belief that justice requires a policy of "land to the tiller". However, many of these arguments conflict with prevailing notions of property rights in most societies and states. Implementations of land reform generally raise questions about how the members of the society view the individual's rights and the role of government.
These questions include:
Concern over the value of land reform is based upon the following:
Opposing "royal libertarian" (but not geolibertarian) ethical arguments to government-directed "land reform" maintain it is just a euphemism for theft, and argue that stealing is still stealing regardless of whether property was originally justly obtained, or what any group of non-owners (of the property in question) may succeed in obtaining via government intermediary, and that such policies consequently cannot ever be just.[2] They state that alleged "willing seller, willing buyer" programs also invariably involve governments buying land with tax-money (which may or may not be disproportionately collected from those whose land is the subject of the planned reform), and sometimes laws granting government first right to buy land for sale (diminishing the market value of the land by eliminating competing buyers), and so an element of coercion exists despite the "willing" label.
The opposition for a land reform may also be based on other ideologies than modern-day liberalism. In countries where there has traditionally been no private land ownership (e.g. Russia in 19th century) the opposition for reforms enabling the creation of private farms may use nationalistic arguments, proposing that the private farms are inconsistent with the national culture. In countries where the established church was an important land owner, theological arguments have been used in the debate on privatization or nationalization of that land (e.g. 16th century Sweden). The right to ownership of the land, and sometimes, the persons residing on that land, has also been argued on the theory of right of conquest, implying that the original ownership was transferred to the land-owning class's ancestors in a just war. The ownership can also be argued on the ground of god-given right, implying that a supernatural power has given the land to its owners.
For the proponents of the reform, the rights of the individuals for whose good the reform is supposed to work trump the property rights of the land owners. Usually their philosophical background differs significantly from the viewpoints outlined above, spanning from Marxism to religious ideologies. What is common for them, is that they see the rights or duties advocated as more important than a right to own real estate.
See also property redistribution.
Agrarian land reform has been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history — see, for example, the history of the Semproninan Law or Lex Sempronia agraria proposed by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and passed by the Roman Senate (133 BC), which led to the social and political wars that ended the Roman Republic.
A historically important source of pressure for land reform has been the accumulation of significant properties by tax-exempt individuals or entities. In ancient Egypt, the tax exemption for temple lands eventually drove almost all the good land into the hands of the priestly class, making them immensely rich (and leaving the world a stunning legacy of monumental temple architecture that still impresses several millennnia later), but starving the government of revenue. In Rome, the land tax exemption for the noble senatorial families had a similar effect, leading to Pliny's famous observation that the latifundia (vast landed estates) had ruined Rome, and would likewise ruin the provinces. In the Christian world, this has frequently been true of churches and monasteries, a major reason that many of the French revolutionaries saw the Catholic church as an accomplice of the landed aristos. In the Moslem world, land reforms such as that organized in Spain by al-Hurr in 718 have transferred property from Muslims to Christians, who were taxable by much higher rates.
In the modern world and in the aftermath of colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, land reform has occurred around the world, from the Mexican Revolution (1917; the revolution began in 1910) to Communist China to Bolivia (1952, 2006) to Zimbabwe and Namibia. Land reform has been especially popular as part of decolonization struggles in Africa and the Arab world, where it was part of the program for African socialism and Arab socialism. Cuba has seen one of the most complete agrarian reforms in Latin America. Land reform was an important step in achieving economic development in many Third World countries since the post-World War II period, especially in the East Asian Tigers and "Tiger Cubs" nations such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Malaysia.
Since mainland China's economic reforms led by Deng Xiaoping land reforms have also played a key role in the development of the People's Republic of China, with the re-emergence of rich property developers in urban areas (though as in Hong Kong, land in China is not privately owned but leased from the state, typically on very long terms that allow substantial opportunity for private speculative gain).
Land reform is discussed in the article on Arab Socialism
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