Tribe or title? Ethnic enclaves and the demand for formal land tenure in a Tanzanian slum

Matthew Collin

No 2013-12, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the demand for formal land tenure in urban Tanzania. Using a unique census of two highly-fractionalized unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, I show that households located near coethnics are significantly less likely to purchase a limited form of land tenure recently offered by the government. I attempt to address one of the chief concerns – endogenous sorting of households – by conditioning on a household’s choice of coethnics neighbors upon arrival in the neighborhood. I also find that coethnic residence predicts lower levels of perceived expropriation risk, but not perceived access to credit nor contribution to local public goods. These results suggest that close-knit ethnic groups may be less likely to accept state-provided goods due to their ability to generate reasonable substitutes, in this case protection from expropriation. The results are robust to different definitions of coethnicity and spatial cut-offs, controls for family ties and religious similarity as well as spatial fixed effects. Finally, the main result is confirmed using a large-scale administrative data-set covering over 20,000 land parcels in the city, exploiting ethnically-unique last names to predict tribal affiliation.

Keywords: Ethnicity; Land tenure; Tanzania; Unplanned settlements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 Q15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-ure
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