SHARECROPPING AND MANAGEMENT OF LARGE RURAL ESTATES IN CONTEMPORARY CATALONIA 1

The capacity of forms of tenure, in particular sharecropping, to stimulate agricultural growth has fuelled a wide-ranging debate, begun by the classical economists of the eighteenth century and continued until today. Up until the 1970s, the dominant opinion was unfavourable to sharecropping. Since then, however, various empirical and theoretical studies have appeared which question such a view. These studies mostly take a neo-institutional approach. Distancing themselves from more orthodox neoclassical thinking, they start from the premise that a perfectly competitive market, in which a rational distribution of resources can be achieved, does not exist and conclude that sharecropping could reach notable levels of efficiency, albeit only second-best efficiency. 2 These conclusions coincide in part with some research into contemporary Spanish and Catalan agriculture, the results of which contradict the dominant picture of backwardness and low capacity for agricultural growth. The aim of this article is to analyse the role of sharecropping in Catalonia and to question the importance of this form of tenure in explaining the slow growth of Catalan agriculture. Backwardness has been a recurrent theme in Spanish economic history, and blame for this situation has frequently been attributed to the agricultural sector, the system of property holding and the forms of tenure being singled out as the main obstacles to change. The time frame of this article is the hundred years or so between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and its setting is Catalonia. It summarises the findings of our study of a group of large landed estates evenly distributed across the main agricultural areas of Catalonia [Garrabou, Planas & Saguer, 2000] and it is to that study that we refer the reader for the substantiation of the claims we make below.