Transcript The Profits of Power: Land Rights and Agricultural

The Profits of Power:
Land Rights and Agricultural
Investment in Ghana
Markus Goldstein,
The World Bank
Christopher Udry,
Yale
Institutions
• Institutions are not static in purpose nor
their impact on the distribution of
economic opportunity
• Institutionsproperty rightsinvestment
incentives
• Inequality of property rightsskewed
distribution of returns
Our work
• Looks at this relationship in the context of
Ghana’s Eastern Region
• Complex, negotiable property rights
agricultural productivity
• Lower productivity for those not connected
to the political hierarchy (which includes
most women)
Land tenure in W Africa
• Berry: "the commercialisation of land
transactions has not led to the consolidation of
land rights into forms of exclusive individual or
corporate control comparable to Western notions
of private property”
• Indeed, land "is subject to multiple, overlapping
claims and ongoing debate over these claims'
legitimacy and their implications for land use and
the distribution of revenue“
Agriculture in Akwapim
• Sources of land:
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Chiefs: stool land, dispute resolution, allocation
Lineage (abusua): right to use ancestors land
individual (mostly matrilineal inheritance)
Family-stool nexus
Range of contracts
Farm mostly maize and cassava
Men and women farm separate, multiple plots
Shifting cultivations, so fallowing is key
investment
The data
• 2 year rural household survey
• Around 240 hhs in 4 village clusters, men
and women interviewed separately
• 15 interviews, about 5-6 weeks apart
• Modular survey (35) with detailed ag
production data
• GPS, Ph and OM
• Focus groups
Empirical strategy
• Within hh profits (fallow matters)
• Determinants of fallow (politics matters)
• Political economy of land allocation within
a matrilineage (need with imperfect
information)
Within household production
-efficient production predicts that
identical plots, within a household, will
have identical yields
Land and the matrilineage
• Allocated land evolved in time of land
abundance (no optimal fallow issues)
• Focus groups:
– Abusua allocates on need
– Leaving land fallow indicates lack of need
• Need is private information, fallow is signal
• Incomplete information (off-farm work,
spouse evidence)
Sketch of model of abusua
allocation
• Leadership has obligation to provide land
to those in “need”
– Have alternate use but also incur costs when
enough poor do not get it
• Need is not-observable (off-farm income
opportunities)
• Cultivation requirement to separate
rich/poor, rich won’t sacrifice off-farm to
cultivate continuously
Conclusion
• We agree “the process of acquiring and
defending rights in land is inherently a
political process based on power relations
among members of a social group” (B&C)
• However, these complex, multiple and
overlapping rights are associated with
barriers to investment in land fertility
– Particularly for women
With a significant cost
• Most farmers would increase steady state output
20-50% with one more year of fallow.
• Approx 434,000 hectares of land in Ghana is
planted to maize and cassava in Regions with
likely similar land tenure
• This gain would be about 1.4-2.1% of 1997 GDP,
13-19% of national poverty gap
• But institutions don’t arise in a vacuum: weigh
this against the safety net