Skip to content

Category: Land

Published November 22, 2011

The Cost of Complex Land Titles and Ellickson’s Must-Read Book for Development Folks

Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This little-analyzed custom discouraged soil conservation and land improvements, and, especially after 1600, contributed to China’s inability to keep pace with England. After calamitous experiences with land collectivization between 1951 and 1981, China’s Communist government began to confer private land-use rights. But, instead of making outright sales, it chose to award contractual rights only for a fixed-term, for example, 50 years in the case of an industrial parcel. For the same reasons dian did, this policy threatens to impair China’s prospects of economic development.

This is the abstract of Robert C. Ellickson’s latest paper. Land rights have been very much on my mind lately, as I am revising a paper studying their effect on rice productivity in Madagascar.

If you have an interest in development and are not familiar with Ellickson’s work, you are seriously missing out.

Ellickson is Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at the Yale Law School. The first half of his book Order Without Law — which ranks among my the top five social science books — develops a theory of social norms, the essence of which is that social norms emerge and evolve in a way that maximizes the welfare of the community. This is the informal-sector equivalent to Posner’s hypothesis that the common law evolves in a way that is wealth-maximizing.

The second half of Order Without Law illustrates that theory by presenting a case study of the many social norms observed by the cattle ranchers of Shasta County, CA.

If you think you might be interested in reading Ellickson’s book but aren’t sure about purchasing the book and would like a teaser, read Ellickson’s 1989 Journal of Legal Studies article titled “A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry.” That article presents Ellickson’s theory of social norms and applies it to the norms that emerged to regiment New England’s whaling industry in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Published September 16, 2011

Gender Differences in Agricultural Productivity

This week in my development seminar, we discussed the agricultural household, an economic agent that encompasses is both a producer and a consumer. We then discussed intrahousehold allocations. That is, the distribution of resources within the household, and whether that distribution is efficient.

As part of that discussion, we discussed Udry (1996), a paper every student of development economics is familiar with. Whereas one would expect men and women to be equally productive on their respective plots within the household, Udry finds that in Burkina Faso, men are more productive than women at the margin when controlling for a host of confounding factors.

In practical terms, this means that the land within the average household could be redistributed from women to men to increase household productivity, which falls about 6 percent short of what it could be due to the gender differences in agricultural productivity. More generally, this constitutes a rejection of the hypothesis that the distribution of resources within the household is efficient as well as a rejection of the hypothesis that the preferences of the individuals within the household can be represented by the preferences of a single individual.

I was thus surprised last spring when I read in Ed Carr’s Delivering Development that he’d found that in Ghana, the gender difference went the other way around, i.e., women are more productive than men. Indeed, in chapter 4, Ed writes:

This decision-making becomes even more problematic when we consider the relative agricultural productivity of men and women in Dominase and Ponkrum. My research suggests that women in these villages are between two and three times more productive than their husbands, in terms of income per hectare. While to some extent this is a result of the fact that women farm much less land and therefore can crop it much more intensely than their husbands can their lands, this higher productivity is apparent even when women’s farms increase in size.

Of course, this would need to be subjected to the proper empirical specification and to a battery of statistical tests, but assuming the finding holds, it would be interesting to compare the two countries given that Burkina Faso and Ghana share a border. Is the change in gender differences due to different institutions? Different crops? I’m sure Ed will chime in with a bit more discussion in the comments below.