Digitization and Development: Formalizing Property Rights and its Impact on Land and Labor Allocation

Sabrin Beg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I test the land and labor market effects of a property rights reform that computerized rural land records in Pakistan, making digitized records and automated transactions accessible to agricultural landowners and cultivators. Using the staggered roll-out of the program, I find that while the reform does not shift land ownership, landowning households are more likely to rent out land and shift into non-agricultural occupations. At the same time, cultivating households have access to more land, as rented in land and overall farm size increase. I construct measures of farmer-level TFP and marginal product of land, and demonstrate evidence of improved allocative efficiency as land is redistributed towards more productive farmers. Aggregate district-level production data suggest a reduction in the dispersion of marginal products of land and an improvement in productivity. The results have implications for both the allocation of land across farmers and the selection of labor into farming, demonstrating that agricultural land market frictions present a constraint to scale farming and structural change in developing countries.

Keywords: Property Rights; Rural Mobility; Agricultural Land Markets; ICT in Development; Institutions; Misallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 O10 O12 O13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/108115/1/MPRA_paper_108115.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:108115

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().