IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/isu/genstf/201807010700001056.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rural land titling and property rights: does legislating smallholdings as a non-seizable family asset improve smallholder family farmers’ welfare?

Author

Listed:
  • Murguia, Juan M.
  • Hossiso, Kassu W.
  • Lence, Sergio H.

Abstract

Land titling and property rights have been of interest in agricultural economics for many years because land is the main production asset for agricultural activity. There is evidence that links land titling with increments in productivity and investment. One of the reasons being that titling facilitates access to credit, by enabling the use of land as collateral. In this paper, we study a particular policy in Bolivia, where legislation prevents legally defined smallholdings from being used as collateral, in order to protect smallholders’ source of income, preventing the seizure of their assets. This study analyzes whether smallholders’ welfare is improved by this protective measure, assessing if the positive impact of the land risk premium generated by the non- seizability, has a bigger impact than the negative impact of the capital constraint reducing optimal investment. Differences in land prices are assumed to reflect differences in expected future profit, as a measure of welfare. We use a unique dataset of 2,609 recorded land transactions in the Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, between 2010 and 2015 to determine whether being a smallholding affects land price per hectare. Results indicate that land prices are negatively affected if legally classified as a small ranch, implying that the capital constraint negative effect dominates the land risk premium positive effect, while the opposite is true for farms. To account for other unobservable variables affecting land prices other than non-seizability we refine our analysis considering small neighborhood variations near the cutoff value for “small farms”. Additionally, we analyze policy implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Murguia, Juan M. & Hossiso, Kassu W. & Lence, Sergio H., 2018. "Rural land titling and property rights: does legislating smallholdings as a non-seizable family asset improve smallholder family farmers’ welfare?," ISU General Staff Papers 201807010700001056, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:isu:genstf:201807010700001056
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Noll, Roger G, 1996. "The Complex Politics of Catastrophe Economics," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 12(2-3), pages 141-146, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Vos, Rob & Velasco, Margarita & De Labastida, Edgar, 2006. "Economic and Social Effects of El Niño in Ecuador, 1997-1998," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 2305, Inter-American Development Bank.
    2. Skees, Jerry & Varangis, Panos & Larson, Donald & Siegel, Paul, 2002. "Can financial markets be tapped to help poor people cope with weather risks ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2812, The World Bank.
    3. Vos, R.P. & Velasco, M. & Labastida, E., 1999. "Economic and social effects of "El Nino" in Ecuador, 1997-8," ISS Working Papers - General Series 19037, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    4. Catherine E. Althaus, 2005. "A Disciplinary Perspective on the Epistemological Status of Risk," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 25(3), pages 567-588, June.
    5. Koellinger, Ph.D. & Treffers, T., 2012. "Joy leads to Overconfidence, and a Simple Remedy," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2012-001-STR, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    6. Liu, Shuang & Aurambout, Jean-Philippe & Villalta, Oscar & Edwards, Jacqueline & De Barro, Paul & Kriticos, Darren J. & Cook, David C., 2015. "A structured war-gaming framework for managing extreme risks," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 369-377.
    7. Merrifield, John, 2002. "A general equilibrium analysis of the insurance bonding approach to pollution threats," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 103-115, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q12 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:isu:genstf:201807010700001056. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Curtis Balmer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiasus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.