Property Rights in a Very Poor Country: Tenure Insecurity and Investment in Ethiopia

By D. Ali, Stefan Dercon, Madhur Gautam. 2007

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides evidence from one of the poorest countries of the world that the property rights matter for efficiency, investment, and growth. With all land state-owned, the threat of land redistribution never appears far off the agenda. Land rental and leasing have been made legal, but transfer rights remain restricted and the perception of continuing tenure insecurity remains quite strong. Using a unique panel data set, this study investigates whether transfer rights and tenure insecurity affect household investment decisions, focusing on trees and shrubs. The panel data estimates suggest that limited perceived transfer rights, and the threat of expropriation, negatively affect long-term investment in Ethiopian agriculture, contributing to the low returns from land and perpetuating low growth and poverty.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25bcac447c89b4e7719af18f29d23ab0c5568448

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. K. Deininger
2. Jordan Chamberlin
3. D. Ali
4. G. Feder
5. C. Jumbe
6. Jacob Ricker-Gilbert
7. T. Yamano
8. T. Jayne

In Global and Planetary Change

1. K. Deininger
2. D. Ali
3. G. Feder
4. C. Jumbe
5. T. Yamano
6. Jordan Chamberlin
7. B. K. Jack
8. A. Quisumbing

In Soil Science

1. K. Deininger
2. Jordan Chamberlin
3. Jacob Ricker-Gilbert
4. D. Ali
5. G. Feder
6. T. Yamano
7. C. Jumbe
8. T. Jayne

Citations in the corpus

• Land Registration, Governance, and Development : Evidence and Implications for Policy (2009, background): “As it makes it easier to liquidate and recoup the full value of investments in case of unexpected shocks (Ayalew, Dercon, and Gautam 2005; Deininger and Jin 2006), transferability is likely to increase investment incentives.”
• Land Rights Insecurity and Temporary Migration in Rural China (2010, unknown): “This temporary pattern of rural out-migration does not fit the famous baseline migration models of Lewis (1954) and Harris and Todaro (1970). It is not specific to China, and the temporary migration phenomenon has already given birth to a wide literature in economics.”
• How does population density influence agricultural intensification and productivity? Evidence from Malawi (2014, background): “Present land policy does not allow for the legal sale of land, although inheritance of land is legal (Ali et al., 2011).”
• Legal Knowledge and Economic Development: The Case of Land Rights in Uganda (2006, background): “Relating our variables to the existing literature and the results obtained therein, we draw out implications and discuss the specification and framework for testing these relationships econometrically.”