Insecure Land Rights and Share Tenancy in Madagascar

Insecure Land Rights and Share Tenancy in Madagascar

While most studies looking at the consequences of tenurial insecurity on land markets in developing countries focus on the effects of tenurial insecurity on the investment behavior of landowners, this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and contract choice in land tenancy. Based on a distinct feature of the interaction between formal law and customary ...

Deforestation , Production Intensity and Land Use Under Insecure Property Rights

We propose a framework with endogenous allocation of land between agricultural production, sustainable forest management, and unsustainable forest exploitation in the form of illegal logging to explore deforestation and agricultural and timber supplies when property rights are insecure. Uncertainty over property rights arises through risk of confiscation on sustainably-managed forest land, and ...

The (Im)Possibility of Reverse Share Tenancy

An Asset Risk Theory of Share Tenancy

Reverse share tenancy, wherein poorer landlords rent out land to richer tenants on shares, is a common phenomenon. Yet it does not fit existing theoretical models of sharecropping and has never before been modeled in the economics literature. We explain share tenancy contracts using an asset risk model that incorporates Marshallian inefficiency and thereby provides a credible explanation for sh...

Rights transfers in Madagascar biodiversity policies: achievements and significance

Decentralization and people’s participation have been key features of government environmental policy since the 1990s. In Madagascar, the policy of Secured Local Management of Natural Resources, known as the GELOSE act, has created a framework for the transfer of rights from central government to local communities. This article analyses the practical implementation of this policy by focusing on...