IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v17y2008i4p550-577.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Land Reform, Distribution of Land and Institutions in Rural Ethiopia: Analysis of Inequality with Dirty Data-super- 1

Author

Listed:
  • Bereket Kebede

Abstract

There are two explicitly or implicitly and widely accepted beliefs about the distribution of land in Ethiopia after the reform of 1975. First, land distribution in rural Ethiopia is highly equitable, for example compared with other African countries, where private ownership exists. Second, the current land distribution pattern is basically a result of allocation after the reform; in other words, pre-reform tenures do not help us understand post-reform land distribution. This paper questions both these beliefs. Using formal inequality indexes and a methodology that explicitly considers measurement errors, the empirical results indicate that both inter- and intra-regional inequalities are high; inequality in the distribution of land is comparable with that in other African countries. A regression-based decomposition indicates that distribution of ox ownership and female-headship are important factors affecting inequality. This paper also argues that the post-reform distribution is likely influenced by pre-reform tenures and calls for a more detailed historical analysis. Copyright 2008 The author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Bereket Kebede, 2008. "Land Reform, Distribution of Land and Institutions in Rural Ethiopia: Analysis of Inequality with Dirty Data-super- 1," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 17(4), pages 550-577, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:17:y:2008:i:4:p:550-577
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejm041
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Congdon Fors, Heather & Houngbedji, Kenneth & Lindskog, Annika, 2019. "Land certification and schooling in rural Ethiopia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 190-208.
    2. Akpalu, Wisdom & Bezabih, Mintewab, 2014. "Tenure insecurity, climate variability, and renting-out decisions among female small-holder farmers in Ethiopia," WIDER Working Paper Series 140, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    3. Dokken, Therere, 2013. "Land tenure in Tigray: How large is the gender bias?," CLTS Working Papers 5/13, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies, revised 10 Oct 2019.
    4. Wisdom Akpalu & Mintewab Bezabih, 2015. "Tenure Insecurity, Climate Variability and Renting out Decisions among Female Small-Holder Farmers in Ethiopia," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 7(6), pages 1-16, June.
    5. Wisdom Akpalu & Mintewab Bezabih, 2014. "Tenure Insecurity, Climate Variability, and Renting-Out Decisions Among Female Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2014-140, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    6. Quang Tran, Tuyen, 2012. "A review on the link between nonfarm activities, land and rural livelihoods in Vietnam and developing countries," MPRA Paper 55850, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 17 Nov 2013.
    7. Mintewab Bezabih & Stein Holden & Andrea Mannberg, 2016. "The Role of Land Certification in Reducing Gaps in Productivity between Male- and Female-Owned Farms in Rural Ethiopia," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 52(3), pages 360-376, March.
    8. Kang, Munsu & Schwab, Benjamin & Yu, Jisang, 2020. "Gender differences in the relationship between land ownership and managerial rights: Implications for intrahousehold farm labor allocation," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    9. Di Falco, Salvatore & Veronesi, Marcella, 2014. "Climatic anomalies and conflicts: the role of tenure security on land disputes," 2014 International Congress, August 26-29, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia 183083, European Association of Agricultural Economists.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:17:y:2008:i:4:p:550-577. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.