What Makes Chilean Agriculture Tick? Estimation and Interpretation of Elasticities in Representative Markets

Abstract

The Chilean countryside has experienced dramatic change in the last 20 years. From the mid-1960s onwards successive governments implemented increasingly radical land reforms. This process was stopped by the 1973 military coup, after which some land was returned to the original owners and most of it distributed in individual parcels. Later on some concentration occurred, resulting mainly from small farmers being forced to sell by lack of credit and technical support. But the age-old traditional large estates (described by some authors as pre-capitalist latifundia or haciendas) were not reestablished; instead new family-sized and modern capitalist farms developed. At the same time, the post-1973 macroeconomic policies liberalised external trade and domestic prices, and agricultural exports and imports rose. The traditional patterns of land exploitation, labour use and rural-urban migration all experienced substantive change (Rivera and Cruz, 1984; Kay, 1985).