Daniel Ayalew Ali

Impacts of Land Certification on Tenure Security: Investment, and Land Market Participation : Evidence from Ethiopia

While early attempts at land titling in Africa were often unsuccessful, factors such as new legislation, low-cost methods, and increasing demand for land have generated renewed interest. A four-period panel allows use of a pipeline and difference-indifferences approach to assess impacts of land registration in Ethiopia. We find that the program increased tenure security, land-related investment, and rental market participation and yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation. (JEL O13, Q15)

Do Overlapping Land Rights Reduce Agricultural Investment? Evidence from Uganda

The need for land-related investment to ensure sustainable land management and increase productivity of land use is widely recognized. However, there is little rigorous evidence on the effects of property rights for increasing agricultural productivity and contributing toward poverty reduction in Africa. Whether and by how much overlapping property rights reduce investment incentives, and the scope for policies to counter such disincentives, are thus important policy issues. Using information on parcels under ownership and usufruct by the same household from a nationally representative survey in Uganda, the authors find significant disincentives associated with overlapping property rights on short and long-term investments. The paper combines this result with information on crop productivity to obtain a rough estimate of the magnitudes involved. The authors make suggestions on ways to eliminate such inefficiencies.

Is There a Farm Size–Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture? Evidence from Rwanda

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and crop productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. Plot-level data from Rwanda point toward constant returns to scale and a strong negative relationship between farm size and crop output per hectare that is robust across specifications and emerges also if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used but disappears if family labor is valued at market rates. In Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.

Assessing the functioning of land rental markets in Ethiopia

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household‐level fixed‐effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the Ethiopian highlands provide support for the hypothesis of Marshallian inefficiency. At the same time, a factor adjustment model suggests that the extent to which rental markets allow households to attain their desired operational holding size is limited. Our analysis points toward factor market imperfections (no rental for oxen), lack of alternative employment opportunities, and tenure insecurity as possible reasons underlying such an outcome. They suggest that, rather than worrying only about Marshallian inefficiency, attention to the broader environment and policy framework within which producers can adjust to their optimum operational area will be warranted.

Impacts of land certification on tenure security, investment, and land markets: evidence from Ethiopia.

Although early attempts at land titling in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights in view of increased demand for land, options for registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by combining information technology with participatory methods have led to renewed interest. This paper uses a difference-in-difference approach to assess economic impacts of a low-cost registration program in Ethiopia that, over 5 years, covered some 20 million parcels. Despite policy constraints, the program increased tenure security, land-related investment, and rental market participation and yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation.

Credit Constraints and Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from rural Rwanda

Abstract While potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. We use a direct elicitation approach on a national sample of Rwandan rural households to empirically assess the extent and nature of credit rationing in the semi-formal sector and its impact, using an endogenous switching model. Elimination of all constraints could increase output by some 17 per cent. Implications for policy and research are spelled out.

Productivity Effects of Land Rental Markets in Ethiopia: Evidence from a Matched Tenant-Landlord Sample

As countries increasingly strive to transform their economies from agriculture-based into a diversified one, land rental will become of greater importance. It will thus be critical to complement research on the efficiency of specific land rental arrangements -- such as sharecropping -- with an inquiry into the broader productivity impacts of the land rental market. Plot-level data for a matched landlord-tenant sample in an environment where sharecropping dominates allows this paper to explore both issues. The authors find that pure output sharing leads to significantly lower levels of efficiency that can be attenuated by monitoring while the inefficiency disappears if inputs are shared as well. Rentals transfer land to more productive producers but realization of this productivity advantage is prevented by the inefficiency of contractual arrangements, suggesting changes that would prompt adoption of different contractual arrangements could have significant benefits.

Do overlapping property rights reduce agricultural investment ? evidence from Uganda

The need for land-related investment to ensure sustainable land management and increase productivity of land use is widely recognized. However, there is little rigorous evidence on the effects of property rights for increasing agricultural productivity and contributing toward poverty reduction in Africa. Whether and by how much overlapping property rights reduce investment incentives, and the scope for policies to counter such disincentives, are thus important policy issues. Using information on parcels under ownership and usufruct by the same household from a nationally representative survey in Uganda, the authors find significant disincentives associated with overlapping property rights on short and long-term investments. The paper combines this result with information on crop productivity to obtain a rough estimate of the magnitudes involved. The authors make suggestions on ways to eliminate such inefficiencies.

Credit Constraints, Agricultural Productivity, and Rural Nonfarm Participation: Evidence from Rwanda

Although the potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households to assess empirically the extent and nature of credit rationing in the semi-formal sector and its impact using an endogenous sample separation between credit-constrained and unconstrained households. Being credit constrained reduces the likelihood of participating in off-farm self-employment activities by about 6.3 percent while making participation in low-return farm wage labor more likely. Even within agriculture, elimination of all types of credit constraints in the semi-formal sector could increase output by some 17 percent. Two suggestions for policy emerge from the findings. First, the estimates suggest that access to information (education, listening to the radio, and membership in a farm cooperative) has a major impact on reducing the incidence of credit constraints in the semi-formal credit sector. Expanding access to information in rural areas thus seems to be one of the most promising strategies to improve credit access in the short term. Second, making it easy to identify land owners and transfer land could also significantly reduce transaction costs associated with credit access.

Using Administrative Data to Assess the Impact and Sustainability of Rwanda's Land Tenure Regularization

Rwandas completion, in 2012/13, of a land tenure regularization program covering the entire country allows the use of administrative data to describe initial performance and combine the data with household surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In 2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between 5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent for agricultural land in the rest of the country; and US