Adaptive investment with land tenure and weather risk: Behavioral evidence from Tanzania

Martine Visser, Pierre Le Roux, Chalmers K. Mulwa, Byela Tibesigwa and Mintewab Bezabih

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2024, vol. 217, issue C, 398-434

Abstract: Two important risks faced by many smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are erratic weather patterns and insecure land tenure. It is likely these risks will increasingly interact as projections of more erratic weather make small-scale farming more difficult and demand for rural land grows. This paper asks how farmers in Western Tanzania view these compound risks and the influence this has on levels of investment in adaptive agricultural technologies and the demand for land certification in a lab-in-the-field setting. Presenting novel data from a series of framed decision tasks linked to a household survey, this paper explores the relationship between individual risk preferences, adaptive investment and the demand for land certification from a group of 645 rural households in Kigoma, Tanzania. While adaptive investment increases with weather related risk, we find it responds negatively to land tenure risk. Individual risk preferences and past experiences of land disputes play significant roles in adaptive investment. Demand for land certification is high, investment increases significantly after certification, especially for risk-averse individuals.

Keywords: Agricultural investment; Climate change adaptation; Land tenure risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C93 D80 O13 Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123004006
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Adaptive Investment with Land Tenure and Weather Risk: Behavioral Evidence from Tanzania (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:217:y:2024:i:c:p:398-434

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.10.040

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().