Ohkita, Hiroyuki

大北, 弘幸

It has long been believed, without any hard evidence, that the land reform in Japan had a positive impact on productivity in agriculture. The theory of contract, however, tells that the contrary must be the case at least in the short-run: under the land tenancy conditions prevailing in prereform Japan, no source of productivity increase can be figured out theoretically. Following a few pioneering studies, we challenge in this paper to this deep-rooted belief empirically by examining rice farming in Yamagata Prefecture. Statistical tests in which the rate of tenancy in the prereform period is compared to the rate of increase in land productivity in the post-reform period fail to reject the null hypothesis that the land reform gave no productivity impact.