Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity

This paper quantifies how insecure farmland tenure, i.e. the presence of insecure individual communal land endowments, impacts agricultural and non-agricultural
productivity. We build a general equilibrium model where communal land is continuously redistributed. The set of policies is exogenous and includes the fraction of communal land as well as a redistribution function based on individual actions. We show theoretically how a particular redistributive policy adversely impacts productivity by distorting the allocation of land across farm operators and by distorting skill allocation along theoccupational choice between agricultural and non-agricultural activities. In a second step we propose to infer an actual policy based on data from Ethiopia and to investigate its impact on productivity