Measuring agricultural land inequality – Conceptual and methodological issues

Measures of agricultural land inequality have primarily relied on the distribution of farm size, using information from agricultural census data. In this paper, we use an expanded approach, recognizing the complexity and the multiple dimensions that involve the concept of land inequality. Beyond land area, we propose a set of indicators to account for aspects of land rights and land quality, as well as to integrate the landless population, to measure more comprehensively land inequality, in a cross-country comparable manner while leveraging data from both living conditions household surveys and agricultural censuses. We then apply these indicators to household survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, enriched with a set of geospatial data features that determine agricultural land quality. Our results show that not accounting for land quality and secure tenure rights can lead to a significant underestimation of land inequality. We also discuss the scalability of this approach in other countries and regions considering both current data limitations and opportunities. Our assessment of existing data across the globe reveals that accounting for land rights represents the biggest challenge since most of the data sources capture limited information on land tenure diversity and individual rights. Finally, we map countries worldwide where data is available for scaling up our approach.