Smaller Farms, Fewer Firms? Who Gains and Who Loses from Agricultural Land Fragmentation: Guest post by Aishwarya Kekre - World Bank Blogs

In 2011, a special economic zone project of Reliance, a major conglomerate in India, had been stalled for over five years due to difficulties in assembling a contiguous land parcel. In fact, a third of firms across low- and middle-income countries report access to land as a moderate to severe constraint on their operations (World Bank Enterprise Surveys). One source of this constraint is the small and declining size of farms in these countries. Small holdings require firms to negotiate with multiple landowners to assemble a site, increasing bargaining costs and holdout risks ( Eckart, 1985 ; Sood, 2022 ). My job market paper examines how agricultural land fragmentation, an understudied barrier to manufacturing expansion, affects local economies.