Abstract
Compared with the vast literature on the investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact of variation in individuals’ tenure security under customary tenure regimes. This is a serious gap not only because most of Africa’s rural land is held under informal arrangements, but also because gradual erosion of long-term rights by women and migrants is often an indication of traditional systems coming under stress. Using a unique survey experiment in Malawi, the analysis shows that (i) having long-term land rights of bequest and sale has a significant impact on investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) women’s land rights of bequest and sale, joint with local institutional arrangements, can amplify the magnitude of such effects; and (iii) the effects found here can be obscured by measurement error associated with traditional approaches to survey data collection on land ownership and rights.
Highlights
While a large literature has discussed investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, the impact of individuals’ tenure security under traditional regimes received much less attention. This is a serious knowledge gaps in Africa where most of rural land is managed under customary tenure and rights of vulnerable groups such as women, migrants or herders may be the first to be attenuated with increased competition for land. To help fill these gaps, we use unique survey data from Malawi to show that individuals’ bequest and sale rights significantly affect investment and cash crop adoption; that the gender of right holders, together with local institutional arrangements, matters for such outcomes; and that these effects may be obscured by measurement error associated with traditional survey data collection methods
To provide substantive and methodological insights on the link between individuals’ land rights and investment, this paper focuses on the case of Malawi, a poor and predominantly rural country that relies heavily on agriculture and that exhibits wide variation in institutional arrangements regulating land access
The results from household fixed effects regressions for application of organic manure and planting of cash crops are presented in table 3, 4, and 5
Summary
While a large literature has discussed investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, the impact of individuals’ tenure security under traditional regimes received much less attention This is a serious knowledge gaps in Africa where most of rural land is managed under customary tenure and rights of vulnerable groups such as women, migrants or herders may be the first to be attenuated with increased competition for land. Right holders’ gender matters on its own and in interactions with local norms: Female bequest and, in non-matrilineal inheritance regimes, sale rights affect investment in soil fertility (proxied by the use of organic manure) whereas male bequest rights increase the level of cash crop adoption These results cannot be replicated using the data from the IHS4 which relies on proxy reporting to elicit information on household members’ parcel ownership and rights the much larger IHS4 sample (more than six times that of the IHPS) should in principle generate more precise estimates. Whereas in formal systems the type of right associated with each document is defined by law and holders’ names documented in writing, individual rights in customary systems are more fluid and need to be obtained by direct questioning
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