2. Why does sharecropping continue to exist as opposed to laborers renting land and paying for the rent with the proceeds of their harvest? Sharecropping is a farming system in which owners of the land allow others to farm it and then the harvest is split, with some portion (let's say half) going to the laborer and some to the land owner. Renting land (the "English system") is an alternative in which laborers pay a fixed monetary rent and then keep all of the proceeds of their production. For hundreds of years commentators have pointed out that sharecropping lowers overall investment and effort and that renting both generates more revenue for owners and, on average, more revenue for laborers due to the harvest generally being much larger. However, when prices drop significantly for agricultural outputs, rents can exceed the total value of output under the English system. Given that in the English system rent returns more money to land owners and on average generates more income for laborers than sharecropping, why is sharecropping still so common? Note: The answer is not that the sharecroppers do not own land. Indeed, globally many sharecroppers are landowners who engage in sharecropping on the labor and land supply side at the same time, so they have land that they are having someone else sharecrop on while sharecropping on someone else's land at the same time.
2. Why does sharecropping continue to exist as opposed to laborers renting land and paying for the rent with the proceeds of their harvest?
Sharecropping is a farming system in which owners of the land allow others to farm it and then the harvest is split, with some portion (let's say half) going to the laborer and some to the land owner. Renting land (the "English system") is an alternative in which laborers pay a fixed monetary rent and then keep all of the proceeds of their production. For hundreds of years commentators have pointed out that sharecropping lowers overall investment and effort and that renting both generates more revenue for owners and, on average, more revenue for laborers due to the harvest generally being much larger. However, when prices drop significantly for agricultural outputs, rents can exceed the total value of output under the English system. Given that in the English system rent returns more money to land owners and on average generates more income for laborers than sharecropping, why is sharecropping still so common? Note: The answer is not that the sharecroppers do not own land. Indeed, globally many sharecroppers are landowners who engage in sharecropping on the labor and land supply side at the same time, so they have land that they are having someone else sharecrop on while sharecropping on someone else's land at the same time.
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