Land tenure security and investment: Does strength of land right really matter in rural Burkina Faso?

The causal relationship between land tenure security and agricultural investment plays a crucial role in the process of rural development. Land property rights are key determinants for reducing poverty through agricultural productivity, natural resource management, and socio-economic inequalities. Growing competition for land access increases the sensitivity in land socio-economic stakes and related policies in developing countries. This paper analyzes the impacts of land rights on land-related investment in rural Burkina Faso. We use rural representative panel data and appropriate methods. The Two-Stage Conditional Maximum Likelihood approach is used for dealing with endogeneity, while the Generalized Structural Equation Model allows us to control for random effects. We show that stronger land rights increase land-attached investment, and land investment has positive and negative effect on stronger and weaker land rights, respectively, in rural Burkina Faso. Our study also finds that women and immigrants have less land rights than men and natives, respectively. Our contribution to related literature includes the use of rigorous process of hierarchy in land rights. The close link of the results with land right strength is of great interest for cautious practitioners in land tenure and investment. Moreover, our results imply that a gain of efficiency can be achieved from combining practices in land tenure and investment.