LA lo largo de siglos fue frecuente que en las huertas de la España mediterránea administradas por comunidades de regantes se produjera algo aparentemente irracional: pese a que el riego era básico para intensificar la producción agraria, a primera vista muchas huertas tenían un tamaño...

It is usually taken for granted that the existence of water markets allows economic efficiency gains to be achieved at the expense of equity losses. This paper addresses the issue by analysing the functioning of the irrigation communities in pre-1950s eastern Spain. While in some of them the...

By custom, in several different regions of Europe tenants were the owners of the improvements they carried out on the farm. As a result of such customs, rents usually remained below the Ricardian equilibrium over long periods of time and therefore cannot be used to calculate the total factor...

This article stresses that tenants are more motivated to improve the holding when they have formal property rights over their improvements. In this case, however, their rights over the improvements usually come into conflict with the landlords' rights over the land. Through a comparison with...

Literature on the Spanish agricultural co-operative movement of the first third of the XX century has experienced a substantial change in direction over recent years. Where the first papers published up to the mid 1980s argued that its dominant features were precariousness and a discontinuous...

In the 19th century, Eastern Spanish “huertas” witnessed a dramatic growth and intensification of their output, which was achieved by means of an agrarian development model based on a peasant economy and the cash renting of small plots. This paper looks at characteristics and longrun...