Financialization of Land in Peripheral Countries: Disciplining Agrarian Structures and Perpetuating Macroeconomic Vulnerabilities

Abstract

This paper investigates how land financialization gains traction in peripheral countries, even amidst challenges like informal land ownership, unclear property rights, social conflicts, extreme land inequality, social unrest, and a primary-export economy. It unfolds in two stages: first, revisiting key concepts like 'agrarian structure' and core-periphery dependency, originally used by Latin American economists in the 1970s and 1980s to analyze land concentration, distributive conflicts, and macroeconomic vulnerabilities. Second, it identifies how land financialization influences existing agrarian structures. The goal is to clarify why, despite a disorganized institutional context, there is an increase in financial motives, roles, and agents for land control. Considering new financial innovations, policies, and institutional changes in the region, it is essential to explore the impact of finance in a new phase of dependency between core and peripheral countries, now focused on natural resource control beyond traditional macroeconomic realms.