Land fragmentation, cropland abandonment, and land market operation in Albania
By K. Deininger, S. Savastano, C. Carletto. 2012
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Albania's radical farmland distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient, and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This paper uses farm-level data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey to explore this quantitatively. The analysis finds no support for the argument that fragmentation reduces productivity. However, producers fail to utilize about 10 percent of the country's productive land, and, in the majority of cases, this land has been idle for at least five years. Farmers quote inefficiently-small plots as the reason for this in few cases, casting doubt on the scope for land consolidation to solve this issue. Instead, the data are consistent with the notion of land market imperfections, which can be traced to gaps in the legal and policy framework, as well as inefficiencies in registry operations, leading to land abandonment on a large scale. To maintain the productive potential of Albania's rural economy and, if and when needed, the ability to conduct consolidation in a cost-effective and sustainable manner, it will be critical to complement the emphasis on consolidation with an effort to address those gaps and inefficiencies on a priority basis.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a41cdb5409599ad775bccf5aeafc863e8c4cce3
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Is There a Farm Size–Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture? Evidence from Rwanda (2014, background): “Consolidation efforts in Eastern Europe have a mixed record, partly because they failed to address key institutional factors (Deininger et al. 2012).”
- Assessing the impacts of land fragmentation and plot size on yields and costs: A translog production model and cost function approach (2018, background): “Under these circumstances, land fragmentation could reduce both land and labor productivity, thus affecting agricultural production (Ali and Deininger, 2014; Barrett et al., 2010; Deininger et al., 2012; Jia and Martin, 2014; Kalantari and Abdollahzadeh, 2008; Schultz, 1953; Tan et al., 2010).”
- Land consolidation: An indispensable way of spatial restructuring in rural China (2014, background): “, 2013a), and to the linkages between land consolidation, rural restructuring and agriculture-rural economy (Wilson, 1995; Deininger et al., 2012).”