Evangelos Dioikitopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business: "The Elimination of Common Rights and Comparative Economic Development in a Malthusian World"

The Elimination of Common Rights and Comparative Economic Development in a Malthusian World”, with Ken Tabata (Kwansei University) and Vicky Fouka (Stanford University)

This paper builds a two-sector growth model with agriculture and industry to examine the divergence in economic development during the Malthusian era by focusing on the elimination of common rights in agricultural land. We argue that the institutional change in land property rights induced by the enclosure movement in England can account for the joint behavior of the urbanization rate, per capita income, agricultural labor productivity and population density in the eve of Industrial revolution. Sectoral labor reallocations induced by enclosure, rather than agricultural productivity improvements, matter as a factor to explain per capita income differences in the Malthusian world. A calibration of the model shows that differences in the share of private fields alone can account for a sizable proportion of the observed differences between England and France.