The question of land access and the Spanish land reform of 1932
本文利用1860-1930年西班牙省级数据，发现无地工人数量因土地价格与农村工资比率下降及人口外流而显著减少，质疑1932年土地改革的经济必要性。
Abstract Spanish land reform, involving the breakup of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and was justified on economic and political grounds. This article employs new provincial data on landless workers, land prices, and agrarian wages to consider whether 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 (1931–6). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made plots of land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy; and structural change that drained the rural population from the countryside Given that shifts in factor prices were already helping workers gain access to land by the 1930s, the economic arguments for introducing reform at that time remain unclear.