1st Edition

Economics of Peasant Farming

By Doreen Warriner Copyright 1965
    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    292 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book, first published in 1939, was originally conceived as an investigation of peasant farming in Europe written in the years of the agricultural depression of the nineteen-thirties. It shows an immense contrast between the well-capitalized commercial peasant farming of Western Europe and the poor subsistence farming of the remotest parts of Eastern Europe; and between these two extremes a wide range of variation in standards of living and farming efficiency.

    Part 1 Europe's farm problem: agriculture and economic development; the origin of peasant society; differences in standards of living in Europe; Europe's farm problem; the political background. Part 2 The German solution: population and production; trade and tariffs; possible remedies. Part 3 Over-population: what is over-population?; what level of density indicates surplus population?; causes of the high density of farm population. Part 4 The standard of living: nutrition; housing; consumption of manufactured goods. Part 5 The efficiency of the farming system: Czechoslovakia and Western Hungary. Part 6 The efficiency of the farming system: the Danube plain in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Part 7 The efficiency of the farming system: Poland, Transylvania, Yugoslavia south of the Slava. Part 8 The advantages and disadvantages of peasant farming: advantages - the effect of peasant farming on the distribution of income, employment and labour conditions; disadvantages - technical defects, capital investment. Part 9 The Russian solution: the results of collectivization; the social organization; incomes and standards of living; collectivization as a remedy for Eastern Europe; conclusion.

    Biography

    Doreen Warriner Reader in Social and Economic Studies of Eastern Europe, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London.