Land use restrictions, misallocation in agriculture, and aggregate productivity in Vietnam

Kien Le

Journal of Development Economics, 2020, vol. 145, issue C

Abstract: This paper evaluates the effects of restricted land use rights on aggregate productivity using micro-level data within a quantitative model. In particular, I exploit the Rice Land Designation Policy in Vietnam, which forces farmers to produce rice on almost 45% of land plots. I use digitized versions of Vietnam's Local Land Use Atlas and Global Agro-Ecological Zones database to construct a micro-spatial dataset that shapes the model features and allows me to compare the restricted against a counterfactual efficient allocation. The main findings suggest that eliminating all land use restrictions leads to an 8.03% increase in real GDP per capita. While misallocation in agriculture has been studied extensively, the paper highlights a novel source of misallocation also prevalent in other countries such as China, Myanmar, and Uzbekistan.

Keywords: Agriculture; Misallocation; Land use restrictions; Aggregate productivity; Vietnam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O13 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387820300407
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Land Use Restrictions, Misallocation in Agriculture, and Aggregate Productivity in Vietnam (2018)
Working Paper: Land Use Restrictions, Misallocation in Agriculture, and Aggregate Productivity in Vietnam (2018)
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:deveco:v:145:y:2020:i:c:s0304387820300407

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102465

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().