Land Ownership Inequality and Rural Factor Markets in Turkey

FATMA GÜL ÜNALEconomics Specialist for UNDP/Regional Bueau for Asia and the Pacifica, Regional Strategy and Policy Unit.She has taught economics at Bard College at Simon's Rock, USA, Bucknell University, and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a staff economist at the Center for Popular Economics.

• Introduction: Why Agriculture? A Portrait of Turkish Agriculture: Inequality and its Discontents Sharecropping or Fixed Rent Tenancy? Testing For Inverse Size-Yield Relationship in Turkish Agriculture Conclusions

"Fatma Gül Ünal exposes the historic and geographic basis of Turkey's rural poverty and land inequality, which have recently increased, despite general economic success. Her new fieldwork confirms that - contrary to prevailing prejudice - smaller, more equal farms, reliant on family rather than hired labour, are more efficient than larger, machine-intensive farms in most of Turkey, mainly because labor-management is less costly. Yet, as this excellent book shows, exclusive reliance on markets cannot reduce Turkey's land inequality, so land reform is needed for efficient farming - as well as to reduce rural unemployment and poverty, and hence ethnic, regional, and class tensions." - Michael Lipton, member of the Council of the Overseas Development Institute, London, and recipient of Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought