Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity
Paper and briefing quantifing the aggregate impact of communal land tenure arrangements that prevail in Sub-Saharan Africa
Abstract
This paper quantifies the aggregate impact of communal land tenure arrangements that prevail in Sub-Saharan Africa. Such tenure regimes limit land transferability by prohibiting sales, subjecting rented-out land to the risk of expropriation, and redistributing it to existing farmers in a progressive fashion.
We use a general equilibrium two-sector selection model featuring agents heterogeneous in skills to compute the resulting occupational and operational choices as well as land allocations. The quantification of the model is based on policies deduced from Ethiopia. In the Sub-Saharan African context we find that such policies substantially dampen nominal agricultural relative to non-agricultural productivity, by 25%. Real relative agricultural productivity, however, only falls by 4% since cross-sectoral terms of trade adjust strongly, with excess agricultural employment only amounting to some 1.5 percentage points. The loss in GDP is small, about 2%. That serves as a reminder that ostensibly highly distortionary policies need not have substantial bite when individuals strategically adjust to them and equilibrium prices adapt. For example, the model predicts that at given prices 62% of farmers in an economy such as Ethiopia would leave farming if tenure were secured, casting land insecurity as a major obstacle. Yet only 9% would actually switch sectors after price adjustments are factored in.
This research is part of the ‘Agricultural Misallocation, Occupational Choice and Aggregate Productivity - The Role of Insecure Land Rights and Missing Financial Markets’ Project
Citation
Charles Gottlieb and Jan Grobovšek (2015) Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity. Discussion Papers 1513, Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM).
Jan Grobovsek (2017) Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity. University of Edinburgh. School of Economics. Focus paper
Links
Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity - paper
Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity - focus paper (PDF, 202KB)