ABSTRACT
This chapter is mainly about post-1990 market liberalization concerning land access. The discussion consists of four major sections. It begins with an attempt to understand the origin of the post-1980s policy shift away from direct government action to amend the land market failure by way of state-mandated redistributive land reform, which had been a key public measure for poverty and inequality reduction in rural areas since the late 1940s. The second section presents the market-orientated or assisted or negotiated land reform introduced as an integral part of the neoliberal economic reforms. We have already presented, in Chapter 2, the conceptual elements of neoliberalism and the main features of the land market approach to poverty reduction via voluntary land property rights transfer between a willing buyer and a willing seller at market price, supported by external financial assistance. The third section examines the closely related privatization of the historically long-established communally owned customary land in Latin America and many African countries. The last section identifies the impact of market liberalization on existing state-mandated redistributive land reform in a selected sample of six countries: China, Egypt, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Philippines and Russia. Being the mother of communist Marxist ideology on reforming the agrarian structure, Russia is included in order to learn some useful lessons from its recently introduced market mechanism.
