Gender, Power and Agricultural Investment in Ghana1

1 Preliminary and quite incomplete. Please do not cite without permission. helpful comments. INTRODUCTION It has long been hypothesized that the quality of the economic institutions of a society has a fundamental impact on its prospects for economic growth and development. In particular, it is apparent that investment incentives depend upon expectations of rights over the returns to that investment and hence on the nature of property rights. In recent years, economists have paid increasing attention to this hypothesis (and brought the argument into the broader public sphere, e.g. De Soto 2000). Economic historians have provided a great deal of the Engerman and Sokoloff 2003). Recently, economists drawing on crosscountry regressions of economic growth on a variety of measures of institutional quality have also contributed and Jones 1999). This paper joins a rather smaller microeconomic literature that explores the pathways though which particiluar institutions influence investment or productivity Our aim is to examine one particular mechanism through which the nature of the system of property rights in a society can shape its pattern of economic activity. We examine the connection from a set of complex and explicitly negotiable property rights over land to agricultural investment and in turn to agricultural productivity. There are several obvious mechanisms through which property rights over land might influence investment in agriculture: fears of expropriation or loss of control over land on which investments have been made might deter investment; access to credit might be hindered if property rights are not sufficiently well-defined for land to serve as collateral for loans; and an inability to capture potential gains from trade in improved land might reduce investment incentives. Each of these mechanisms has received a good deal of attention in what has become a large literature (Besley 1995). In much of Africa, explicit land transactions — sales, cash rentals, sharecropping — have become more common over recent decades. However, the consensus of the literature is that " the commercialisation of land transactions has not led to the consolidation of land rights 1 into forms of exclusive individual or corporate control comparable to Western notions of private property " (Berry, NCP, 104). Instead, in much of West Africa, land " is subject to multiple, overlapping claims and ongoing debate over these claims' legitimacy and their implications for land use and the distribution of revenue " (Berry, CNTB, xxi). Individuals' investments in a particular plot might in turn …