Land acquisition and economic development: A decolonised view

Abstract

While the colonial powers had access to lands and related resources in other countries for their initial phases of industrialisation, this choice is mostly unavailable to postcolonial countries. In this paper its consequence for the model of accumulation with land acquisition as the central variable in a post-colonial democracy is analysed through a government enabled corporate led industrialisation strategy. We develop a model of land acquisition in Section 2 with its implication for land use patterns taking into account the impacts of demand constraints due to a limited domestic and foreign market. The analysis brings out the net effect of land utilization pattern on employment and output in various situations, and shows its links with the growth of the informal labour markets as a necessary adjunct of the corporate land acquisition model. In section 3 the impact on the informal economy is considered in some details. It shows how a general scheme of cost and regulation arbitrage employed by the corporate sector captures to some extent its impact on the informal sector. The intertwined development of the organized with a vast unorganized sector requires political legitimization to be sustainable. The concluding section 4 deals with the typical legitimization strategies that are adopted to define a spectrum, and the emergence of varieties of corporate capitalist democracies with different role of the state. The paper attempts to identify some elements that partly account for success and failure of the state in ushering in development in post colonial democracies.