Investment Impacts of Gendered Land Rights in Customary Tenure Systems : Substantive and Methodological Insights from Malawi
Compared with the vast literature on the investment and productivity effects of land rights formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact of variation in individuals’ tenure security under customary tenure regimes. This is a serious g...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/330531611177789853/Investment-Impacts-of-Gendered-Land-Rights-in-Customary-Tenure-Systems-Substantive-and-Methodological-Insights-from-Malawi http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35034 |
| Summary: | Compared with the vast literature on the
investment and productivity effects of land rights
formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact
of variation in individuals’ tenure security under customary
tenure regimes. This is a serious gap not only because most
of Africa’s rural land is held under informal arrangements,
but also because gradual erosion of long-term rights by
women and migrants is often an indication of traditional
systems coming under stress. Using a unique survey
experiment in Malawi, the analysis shows that (i) having
long-term land rights of bequest and sale has a significant
impact on investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) women’s
land rights of bequest and sale, joint with local
institutional arrangements, can amplify the magnitude of
such effects; and (iii) the effects found here can be
obscured by measurement error associated with traditional
approaches to survey data collection on land ownership and rights. |
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