Tenure Insecurity, Gender, Low-cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia

Abstract

There is a renewed interest in whether land reforms can contribute to market development and poverty reduction in Africa. This paper assesses effects on the allocative efficiency of the land rental market of the low-cost approach to land registration and certification of restricted property rights that was implemented in Ethiopia in the late 1990s. Four rounds of a balanced household panel from 16 villages in northern Ethiopia are analysed, showing that land certification initially enhanced land rental market participation of (potential) tenant and landlord households, especially those that are headed by females.

The Role of Land Certification in Reducing Gaps in Productivity between Male- and Female-Owned Farms in Rural Ethiopia

“…Accordingly, recent land reforms in developing countries increasingly emphasize joint ownership of land for husbands and wives (Holden et al, 2011). Studies assessing joint titling programs in many cases show that it has promoted better land rights for women (Lastarria-Cornhiel et al, 2003;Gebru, 2011).…”

“…Features of the land certification program have been previously assessed in relation to several economic variables of interest (e.g., Holden et al, 2009;Deininger et al, 2011). Among studies that focus on female-headed households, Holden et al (2011) show that the land certification program in the Tigray Region in Ethiopia enhanced their participation in the land rental market.…”

“…However, these previous studies do not extend to analyzing the productivity-enhancing effects of the program for women, crucially through direct impacts of increased tenure security and through the efficiencyenhancing effects of land markets. Indeed, as pointed out by Deininger et al (2011), analyzing the effect of land certification on the productivity of female farmers may contribute to important insights about the impacts of the program. Accordingly, the major contribution of this paper is that we address the gaps in these studies by explicitly assessing features of the Ethiopian land certification program with respect to the productivity of female-headed households in the Amhara region.…”

“…Among studies that focus on female-headed households, Holden et al (2011) show that the land certification program in the Tigray Region in Ethiopia enhanced their participation in the land rental market. In addition, Holden and Ghebru (2013) find a significant positive effect of certification on food security and nutrition of female-headed households.…”

Institutional Regime, Off-Farm Employment, and the Interaction Effect: What are the Determinants of Households’ Forestland Transfer in China?

“…Thus, participation in rental markets is likely to be sub-optimal under insecure property rights. The positive link between tenure security and the land transaction has been widely observed in empirical studies in different countries [9][10][11][12][13]. In China's farmland transfer market, besides the tenure security, the development of parallel factor markets, especially the off-farm labor market, is seen as another crucial determinant of land transfer [7,[14][15][16][17][18].…”