CHILE"S EXPERIMENTS IN AGRARIAN REFORM : FOUR COLONIZATION PROJECTS REVISITED

the income of new landholders (families) was, on the average, increased two or three times under the (new) system." This statement was qualified in two ways: the sample group was studied soon after the reform took place; and four colonies constituted a rather small sample. This paper attempts to overcome the first difficulty; its purpose is to provide panel design data which are often lacking in discussions of agrarian reform and colonization and to allow the reader to generate some hypotheses that might be worthy of further investigation and analysis. Thus, data on families living on all four farms were gathered again in 1970. Both 1964 and 1970 were considered by local agronomists as "normal agricultural years." The key questions concerning some of the economic issues are: (1) How are net family and per capita income and their distribution different in 1970 from the situation in 1964? (2) How do colonists spend their income? (3) How has labor use changed over the study period? (4) What factors are associated with "economic success"? In 1964, three post-reform tenure patterns were being used on the four settlements. Table 1 describes both these patterns and those found in 1970, the principal income sources, and the pattern of interviewing used.