This paper evaluates the impact of Peru’s collectivist land reform in 1970 on national agricultural productivity. While prior research have shown contrasting impacts of land reform across different settings, few have assessed the productivity consequences of collectivist experiments at the aggregate level. Employing a Synthetic Control Method, we construct a scenario of Peru's productivity trends in the absence of land reform, drawing on data from comparable Latin American countries unaffected by the reform. We estimate the reform's effect by comparing actual productivity series with the counterfactual scenario. Our findings reveal a substantial negative impact, with agricultural productivity remaining about 20 % below the synthetic control between 1969 and 1985. Robustness analyses support the causal interpretation of these effects, as our findings remain consistent across various optimization methods, falsification tests, and alternative donor pools. Importantly, we confirm that our results are not attributable to broader economic trends affecting Peru during the land reform period, as similar impacts were not observed in unaffected sectors. A decomposition analysis attributes the reform's impact to decreases in the overall efficiency of farm production. The shift from individual large landowners to farmer collectives, combined with constraints imposed by an extractive macroeconomic environment, likely disrupted the optimal allocation of resources and technological decision-making within cooperatives, ultimately weakening agricultural Total Factor Productivity.

中文翻译：

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秘鲁土地改革对国家农业生产力的影响：一项合成控制研究

本文评估了 1970 年秘鲁集体主义土地改革对国家农业生产力的影响。虽然先前的研究表明土地改革在不同环境中的影响截然不同，但很少有人在总体层面评估集体主义实验对生产力的影响。采用综合控制方法，我们利用不受改革影响的可比拉丁美洲国家的数据，构建了在没有土地改革的情况下秘鲁生产力趋势的情景。我们通过将实际生产率序列与反事实情景进行比较来估计改革的效果。我们的研究结果揭示了巨大的负面影响，在 20 年至 1969 年期间，农业生产力仍比合成控制低约 1985%。稳健性分析支持对这些影响的因果解释，因为我们的研究结果在各种优化方法、证伪测试和替代供体池中保持一致。重要的是，我们确认我们的结果并非归因于土地改革期间影响秘鲁的更广泛经济趋势，因为在未受影响的部门没有观察到类似的影响。分解分析将改革的影响归因于农业生产整体效率的下降。从个体大地主到农民集体的转变，加上采掘性宏观经济环境施加的限制，可能破坏了合作社内部资源的最佳配置和技术决策，最终削弱了农业全要素生产率。