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Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of a land tenure regularization program covering the entire country allows the use of administrative data to describe initial performance and combine the data with household surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In 2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between 5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent for agricultural land in the rest of the country; and US$2.6 billion worth of mortgages were secured against land and property. Yet, informality of transfers in rural areas remains high. Decentralized service provision and information campaigns help reduce but not eliminate the extent of informality. A strategy to test the efficacy of different approaches to ensure full registration, scale up promising ones, and rigorously monitor the effect of doing so is described.

This paper presents early evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization program. The study examines the links between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. Consistent with the model, improved tenure security under demarcation induces a shift toward long-term investment on treated parcels. This investment does not yet coincide with gains in agricultural productivity. The analysis also identifies significant gender-specific effects. Female-managed landholdings in treated villages are more likely to be left fallow—an important soil fertility investment. Women further respond to an exogenous tenure security change by moving production away from relatively secure, demarcated land and toward less secure land outside the village to guard those parcels.

While scholars agree on the importance of land rental markets for structural transformation in rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their operation, including potential obstacles to their improved functioning, remains limited. This study uses household-level data from six countries to start filling this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land to land-poor, labor-rich, and more productive producers throughout. But vast cross-country variation in transfers and the fact that female managers could possibly improve their income by leasing out land point towards barriers to participation that policy might address. Methodological and substantive conclusions are derived.

Land markets play a limited role in subsistence economies with low skill-intensity of agricultural cultivation, equally distributed land endowments and little movement out of agriculture to join the non-farm economy. But, as the economy starts to diversify, the scope for efficiency-enhancing land transfers beyond immediate kin and for longer than just one season assumes significantly greater importance. Lease markets can contribute to the diversification of the economic base in rural areas by allowing those with limited farming skills to take up non-agricultural employment or to migrate temporarily without losing their links to rural areas, and those with comparative advantage in agriculture to increase the size of the land they farm. Land sales, on the other hand, may allow households who want to move into the non-agricultural economy to mobilize the capital that will help them to exploit profitable economic opportunities. Programs aiming to provide higher level of tenure security and better land information systems have often been justified by noting their impact on lowering transaction costs in land markets. Registered land rights make it easier to identify rightful land owners, negotiate and enforce contracts, and reduce the risk of land owners not being able to recover land that they had rented out. This could in turn increase the number of efficiency-enhancing land market transactions; facilitate credit access via the use of land as collateral; and foster structural change and transformation. At the same time, in settings where market imperfections are prevalent, reducing transaction costs in one market will not necessarily improve outcomes across the board.