Rethinking Land Reform in East Asia: Egalitarian or Inegalitarian?

Taking a historical and comparative view, we explore the long debated cause of the spectacular economic successes of East Asia using land reforms in China and Japan during the 1940-50s. Examining the approach to land reform embodied by technocrats such as Liu Shaoqi in China and Wada Hiroo in Japan in addition to the implementation mechanisms of the policies they adopted, we show that the land reforms developed characteristics of dynamic factor endowment according to the Engerman-Sokoloff hypothesis. Fairly equal land redistribution led to political power equality and improved agricultural productivity and income equality, which is conducive to long-term economic development and the prevention of the Kuznets effect ex ante. Nevertheless, factors such as initial exogenous shocks, insufficient scale of family farming, persistent government support and consequential interest groups obstruct sustainable development of the agricultural sector as well as the generalization of East Asian experiences. Equality or inequality is essentially a policy choice in addition to being a long-term ex post evaluation of the reforms.