Impacts of land tenure security on yield and technical efficiency of maize farmers in Rwanda

Abstract

Land is a valuable resource that determines to a substantial level the social status and economic well-being of households in Rwanda. This study assesses the impact of land tenure security on the improvement of maize yield and technical efficiency of farmers in Rwanda. Using survey data collected in the Eastern Province of Rwanda in 2019, we adopt an approach that combines the sample selection-corrected stochastic production frontier model and propensity score matching model to control for possible selection biases that might arise from unobserved and observed variables. The results reveal that average technical efficiency is consistently higher for landowners than for non-landowners in all models. In addition, landowners appear to have a higher significant yield than non-landowners do. We also find that land input has the highest production elasticity for landowners and non-landowners, implying its considerable influence on maize yield compared with that of other inputs. The fertilizer, labor, and access to irrigation variables also have a significantly positive effect on maize yield for landowners and non-landowners. Our results also show that variables such as education, cooperative membership, credit access, off-farm income, and livestock ownership have a positive and significant effect on the likelihood of owning full property rights to the land.