We investigate the extent of variation in output sharing in land rental contracts and alternative hypotheses to explain this variation. Close to half of the rental contracts in our study in northern Ethiopia have output shares that deviate from the dominant 50-50 equal sharing. Variation in land quality, the relative bargaining power of landlords and tenants, production risks and shocks are hypothesized to influence output shares. Matched data of landlords and tenants are used.

Several studies have shown that the land registration and certification reform in Ethiopia has been implemented at an impressive speed, at a low-cost, and with significant impacts on investment, land productivity, and land rental market activity. This study provides new evidence on land productivity changes for rented land and on the welfare effects of the reform. The study draws on a unique household panel, covering the period up to eight years after the implementation of the reform.

This study investigates whether and to what extent rainfall shocks recurring in Sub-Saharan Africa, that have been associated with distress land rentals, enhance short-term and medium-term access to rented land by tenant households. Tenant households’ rental decisions are modeled in the state-contingent framework with renting-in of land as a risky input choice. Our data is from three rounds of LSMS data from Malawi used to construct a balanced household panel, combined with corresponding district rainfall data that are used to generate seasonal district-wise rainfall shock variables.

In the six months since the coronavirus began its global spread, more than 15 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 600,000 have perished, causing governments around the world to institute lockdowns and shut down businesses while entire industries have been devastated.

Interest in farmland is rising. And,
given commodity price volatility, growing human and
environmental pressures, and worries about food security,
this interest will increase, especially in the developing
world. One of the highest development priorities in the
world must be to improve smallholder agricultural
productivity, especially in Africa. Smallholder productivity
is essential for reducing poverty and hunger, and more and

This paper uses farm panel data from
China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine
investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently,
China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion
of machine rentals and machine services provided by
specialized agents, which has contributed to mechanization
of agricultural production. The empirical results show that
an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion

The authors use data from Ethiopia to
empirically assess determinants of participation in land
rental markets, compare these to those of administrative
land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact
of households' expectations regarding future
redistribution. Results indicate that rental markets
outperform administrative reallocation in terms of
efficiency and poverty. Households who have part-time jobs

The authors examine the impact of land
reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to
exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their
land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase
the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term
investments on the part of households. Their
difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes
advantage of the variation across provinces in the issuance

The goal of this report is to take stock
of the existing evidence on the impact of the Comprehensive
Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) on poverty, to examine the
current challenges that an extension of CARP would face, and
to suggest directions toward achieving progress on land
reform given the financial and policy constraints faced by
the program. The report starts by examining the nature and
relevance of the challenges that an extension of the land

Successive policies of the Government of
Vietnam for economic reform and modernization have helped
Vietnam to emerge as one of the world's fastest growing
economies. The report provides continued recommendations on
improving land policies to ensure efficiency of their
practical implementation and to target at both economic
development and social sustainability. Policies with regard
to voluntary benefits sharing, promoting the participation

We assess the extent of access and degree of participation by smallholder tenants in the land rental market in Malawi. Our study is based on three rounds of nationally representative Living Standards Measurement Surveys collected in 2010, 2013 and 2016, from which we construct a balanced panel. We apply the transaction cost theory, which suggests transaction costs to be non-linear and depend on resource as well as socioeconomic characteristics within the customary tenure system that determines who hold, use and transfer land.

Although still at incipient stages in most areas, agricultural land markets in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are growing rapidly. While the literature on the region’s land markets is expanding, there has been little attention thus far paid to the drivers of land rental prices. We know quite little about whether and how land markets and land contracts respond to meso-scale factors such as spatial variations in land abundance, or to micro-level factors, such as household land endowments.