Submissions Accepted for Presentation at the World Bank Land Conference 2024

This study presents the endline findings of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Burkina Faso Rural Land Governance (RLG, 2009—2014) project evaluation. The study includes a causal impact analysis for indicators that can be addressed rigorously, including: investment behavior on land (e.g., constructing buildings, planting permanent crops, improving irrigation infrastructures or electricity, investing in various agricultural inputs), use of collateralized credit for land improvements, fear of loss of land (e.g., because of government expropriation, lack of documents, or other villagers), total number of conflicts on land, general perception of land security (e.g., whether the individual fears the arrival of new populations to exploit the land for agricultural purposes), perception of inequality in access to land for women. The impact evaluation found no effects on perceptions of land tenure security, land conflict frequency and occurrence, producers’ investment decisions, and incomes and livelihoods.

Under-utilisation of land as collateral for loans is often attributed to the poor quality of the land records infrastructure, which is seen to both increase the cost of closing credit transactions and the risk of collection if a loan fails. In this paper, we examine the link between the heterogeneity of the quality of the land records infrastructure across states in India and the access to credit by households using two new data sets for the analysis. Our findings indicate a weak link between the borrowing patterns of households and the quality of land records infrastructure, particularly the availability of spatial records. This is a departure from perceptions in the literature and policy discourse which suggests a strong linkage between access to formal credit and the land records infrastructure in states. This paper contributes to the literature on the interface between land and access to credit in a developing economy.

Most rural land in Africa is not formally documented, potentially leading to low tenure security and limited land investment incentives. We test whether subsidies for women farmers in Mozambique can boost the impact of land registration on agricultural investment. In a first stage, half of study participants were offered assistance obtaining a no-cost land registration certificate. In a second stage, all participants were offered a package of agricultural inputs, at a randomly selected subsidy. While we find high demand for land registration, it did not significantly increase willingness to pay for the agricultural inputs, regardless of subsidy level. In contrast, subsidies had a large effect on willingness to pay: every 2,000MZN increase in subsidy increased purchase probability by 11 percentage points. Our findings cast doubt on the land registration-investment policy argument and suggest that liquidity constraints are a more important constraint undermining women farmers' investment incentives.

This study investigates the impact of Vietnam’s 2013 Land Law on land transactions, efficiency, labor market and overall household welfare using difference-in-differences method. Plot-level DID results reveal that annual plots which are directly affected by the law are 3 (or 6) percentage points more likely to be leased out (or sold) than perennial land plots. However, there is no significant effect on the likelihood of annual plots being leased in or bought relative to perennial land, highlighting that tenure security affects land supply more than land demand. As both rental and sale markets transfer land from less productive to more productive farmers, the more active land markets incentivized by the law would enhance land use efficiency. Household-level analysis shows that the passage of the law is associated with a shift from self-employed farm work to wage employment, especially in agricultural wag work, and a higher-level per capita household expenditure.