Land property rights and household take-up of development programs: Evidence from land certification program in Ethiopia

Access to secure land plays a key role in the socio-economic development of agricultural households. Since 1998, large-scale land certification programs aimed at strengthening the land property rights of agricultural households in Ethiopia have been implemented across regions to varying degrees. Using a three-period, large-scale nationally representative panel dataset from Ethiopia, this paper investigates the importance of access to secure land property right in the form of land certification for household take-up of agricultural development interventions that aim to improve household agricultural productivity and sustainable land use at a community level. We studied the take-up of agricultural extension packages and participation in community level sustainable land and water management programs as outcome variables. To account for potential endogeneity in the allocation of certificates and other confounding factors, we applied different panel data methods including instrumental variable approach. We find that access to secure property rights have a positive and significant effect on household take-up agricultural development interventions: agricultural extension packages and sustainable land and water management interventions. Additionally, we find that land certificates significantly predict household adoption of chemical fertilizers. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).