The question of land access and the Spanish Land Reform of 1932

Spanish land reform, involving the break-up of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and justified for economic and political reasons. We employ new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930 before the approval of the 1932 Land Reform during the Second Republic (1931-36). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy land plots, and structural change that drained rural population from the countryside. Given that shifts in factor prices were helping workers gain access to land, the economic arguments for reform by the 1930s remain unclea

Entrepreneurship in Africa through the eyes of GEDI

Since the 1990s several new indices, including the Index of Economic Freedom, Doing Business and the Global Competitiveness Index, have been created to achieve progress in modernizing the business climates of developed and developing countries alike. These indicators, however, are focused largely on ameliorating burdens for current business, addressing issues with property rights, processes, etc. While necessary in the public effort to improve economic incentives and create employment, they remain insufficient to foster the economic essence of development: entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship policy are not merely about small business, or even at times about business at all; rather, they are about creating environments in which people are able to perceive entrepreneurial opportunities to improve their lives and in which they are empowered to act on their visions. While much has been written about the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and increasingly about the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), this paper represents the first attempt to examine private enterprise development in Africa