Coping with Drought by Adjusting Land Tenancy Contracts: A Model and Evidence from Rural Morocco

Yoko Kusunose and Travis Lybbert

World Development, 2014, vol. 61, issue C, 114-126

Abstract: We explore vulnerability to drought in Morocco by analyzing household coping responses to a severe drought. We find that nearly 25% of households increased or decreased their cultivated land via short-term land tenancy arrangements. We use this pattern to motivate a model in which drought shocks induce the reallocation within communities of usufruct rights to land. We show how different liquidity constraints can lead some households to invest in crop production as others divest. Empirical analysis finds some support for the model but also highlights how pre-existing tenancy arrangements strongly determine a household’s reliance on land tenancy markets for coping.

Keywords: North Africa; Morocco; drought; asset dynamics; land tenancy; risk sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X14001053
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:wdevel:v:61:y:2014:i:c:p:114-126

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.04.006

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

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