DISCUSSION PAPER SERIESIZA DP No. 13597

Access to Land and Tenancy Practices on
Tanah Bengkok:
Evidence from Java, Indonesia
Takashi Kurosaki
Saumik Paul
Firman Witoelar

AUGUST 2020

DISCUSSION PAPER SERIESIZA DP No. 13597

Access to Land and Tenancy Practices on
Tanah Bengkok:
Evidence from Java, Indonesia
Takashi Kurosaki

Hitotsubashi University

Saumik Paul

University of Newcastle and IZA

Firman Witoelar

Australian National University

AUGUST 2020

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IZA DP No. 13597

AUGUST 2020

ABSTRACT
Access to Land and Tenancy Practices on
Tanah Bengkok:
Evidence from Java, Indonesia*
Tanah bengkok (bengkok land) in Java, Indonesia boasts a unique institution where electedvillage leaders receive usufruct rights to a parcel of land owned by the village, in lieu ofsalary. Despite its relevance to the political economy of land distribution in Java, unavailabilityof systematic data has so far constrained in-depth empirical research on bengkok land. In
2018, we conducted a survey covering 130 villages and more than 1,800 households in
Java. We found substantial heterogeneity in the incidence and use patterns of bengkok
land across villages. Fixed rental tenancy appeared more prevalent than sharecropping on
bengkok land and bengkok landlords seldom got involved in tenants’ farming decisions,which made bengkok land management look more ‘business-like’. Finally, evidence
is consistent with political cycles as the village heads with reelection motives offeredsharecropping contracts to non-relatives to garner a larger pool of supporters.
JEL Classification:

H77, H83, O13, P14, O53, Q15

Keywords:

Tanah bengkok, land tenancy, village administration,
political cycle, Java, Indonesia

Corresponding author:
Saumik Paul
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
United Kingdom
E-mail: paulsaumik@gmail.com* The authors are grateful to Rasyad Parinduri for many helpful discussions during the initial stage of the fieldsurvey, and Hiroyoshi Kano and Hitoshi Yonekura for insightful comments on an earlier draft. The authors thankYutaka Arimoto, Pierre van der Eng, Matthias Helble, Peter Morgan, Naoyuki Yoshino, seminar participants at the
Hitotsubashi Summer Institute in 2018, and seminar participants at the ADBI for useful comments and helpful
discussions. The authors also thank Reiko Doi, Hiroyuki Kuribayashi, and Yoko Oishi for timely research assistance andAkiko Ito, Michie Kano, Yuki Matsuzaki, Makiko Miki, Sawako Ueda and Eriko Yoshida for excellent administrative
support during the field work stage. The authors also gratefully acknowledge efficient and helpful support from thefield survey team of SurveyMETER, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Funding from a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research-A(17H02520) for providing financial support to our primary survey is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer
applies.

1. Introduction
Indonesia, home to nearly 267.7 million people, boasts 1,905 thousand square kilometers ofland of which only 26% is agricultural. As of today, 58 out of every 100 Indonesians live inJava, which makes it the world’s most populous island with 2.5% of Indonesia’s total landmass.
Like other parts of Indonesia, agriculture continues to be the main source of livelihood in Java,and almost 83% of Javanese agricultural families either work as laborers or cultivate less than
0.5 hectares (USAID, 2016). The stiff competition over access to land characterizes thepolitical economy of land distribution in Java, and so does the existence of a historicalinstitution known as tanah bengkok (hereinafter, bengkok land), 1 which mandates a handful tohave access to village land and consequently raises concerns over shared prosperity. Under thisunique institution, elected village leaders and their subordinates obtain usufruct rights to aparcel of land owned by the village, in lieu of salary, as compensations for their services to thevillage.
The prevalence of bengkok land in Java posits a wide range of policy relevant issues that run
from the management of village land through tenancy contracts, electoral process of selecting
the village leader to the welfare of the landless and land-poor households. To gain more insights
on these issues, we administered a household level survey across 130 Javanese villages,
covering more than 1,800 households in Central and East Java in 2018. Within the scope of
this study, we focus and provide empirical evidence on (1) the size and distribution of bengkok
land across 130 Javanese villages, (2) the distribution of usufruct rights over bengkok land
between different types of village administrators, (3) the use of bengkok land through own
cultivation, and tenancy contracts of different types, and finally (4) the terms and conditions of
the tenancy contracts including the rent amount, length of the contract, responsibility of eachparty, among other factors.
To the best of our knowledge, none of the above mentioned issues has been adequately
addressed in the existing literature. Mainly because scattered ethnographic studies, agricultural
surveys 2 and intermittent census figures have been the only sources available on bengkok land.
The Village Potential Statistics (PODES), conducted in line with the implementations of the
Population Census, Agriculture Census and Economic Census in Indonesia, records land
information including bengkok land for all villages in Java. However, the available resourcesfrom PODES do not provide detail information on the distribution of bengkok land among
different administrators, the choices of tenancy contracts and their terms and conditions, andthe electoral process of selecting the village head who gets the usufruct rights to bengkok land.
Our field survey comprised of data collection at three levels: village, household, andagricultural plot. From each study village, we surveyed tenant households roughly in
1

The institution of tanah bengkok was legally codified under the Dutch colonial rule, but there are disputes overits origin before it (see Section 2 for more detail).
2
Antlov (1995); Hart (1986); Kano (1977); Maurer (1998); White and Wiradi (1979).

2

proportion to the total number of tenants in that village, and landlord households 3 as acounterpart of each tenant household. We surveyed four types tenancy contracts in detail. These
are: (1) sharecropped bengkok plots, (2) bengkok plots under fixed rental, (3) sharecropped
non-bengkok plots (i.e., private land), and (4) non-bengkok plots under fixed rental. Our dataset
contains complete information for a sample of 913 tenant households either operating orowning 2,652 plots, out of which detail information on farm production and input use areavailable for 1,692 plots. On the other hand, the landlord sample consists of 930 households
owning 2,500 plots including bengkok plots.
The main findings are previewed in this paragraph. The average ratio of bengkok land to totalland, agricultural land and wet land in the village are found to be 8.6%, 12.1%, and 15.6%,
respectively. The size of bengkok land differs widely across villages. Comparing the bengkok
plots across villages, we find fixed rental tenancy more common than sharecropping whenbengkok recipients (i.e., village officials) sublet bengkok land. The tendency for self-cultivate
bengkok land is strong, especially among village officials other than heads and secretaries. On
the other hand, the size of private landholding is comparable between landowning bengkok
landlords and private landlords. However, the average size of a farm operated by bengkok
tenants (the sum of own land cultivated by themselves, rented-in private land, and rented-in
bengkok land, minus rented-out own land) is larger than that of a farm operated by tenants
working exclusively on private land. Interestingly, village heads are more likely to hire nonrelatives as sharecroppers compared to other officials. The terms and conditions of tenancy
contracts, such as sharecropping shares and fixed rental fees are comparable between bengkok
and non-bengkok plots. The frequency of written contracts is higher among bengkok plots thannon-bengkok plots. These are novel findings that have not been documented elsewhere.
This paper provides a thorough description of the prevalence and functioning of bengkok landwith a large spatial coverage. Our paper relates to a growing volume of research on the political
economy of Indonesia by applied economists (Martinez-Bravo, 2014; Martinez-Bravo et al.,2017; Lim, 2019; Dell and Olken, 2020). Except Lim (2019), however, none of these studies
analyzes bengkok land directly. Lim (2019) examined the long-term impact of bengkok land
institution on productivity and poverty reduction comparing primary data from villages locatednear the boundary dividing Dutch-recognized bengkok area and non-recognized area. The
current study differs from Lim (2019) for two reasons. First, our study does not aim to evaluate
the existence of bengkok land by comparing the socioeconomic outcomes between villages
with and without bengkok plots as done by Lim (2019). We instead focus on the nature of
distribution of bengkok plots between village officials, and the mechanisms of tenancy
3

In Indonesia, private land and land owned by villages are distinctly defined without any overlapping. Bengkok
land is a part of land owned by the village, whose use right is given to a village administrator. Therefore, in theliteral sense, the village administrator is the tenant and the village is the landlord. However, as it is legal andcommon for village administrators to rent out bengkok land to others, which is subletting in the strict sense, wecall this arrangement as the land rental arrangement and call the village administrator a “bengkok landlord” in thispaper.

3

contracts between bengkok plots and individually owned plots in the village. Second, oursurvey covers a much wider area with 130 villages spread across 13 districts in Central andEast Java compared to only two districts studied by Lim (2019). This enables us to provide
more robust evidence on access to land and the existing tenancy practices across villages withbengkok land.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we provide a brief history of bengkok
land. It also provides information on the size and distribution of bengkok land based on villagelevel surveys by independent researchers and PODES. Section 3 describes the survey design,
sampling procedure at the village, tenant-household and landlord-household levels. Detail
descriptive evidence using village-level data is provided in section 4, followed by the samewith household-level data in section 5. Section 6 concludes.

2. A brief history and geography of bengkok land in Java
According to many scholars (Tjondronegoro, 2013), an old system of appanage land from theprecolonial Javanese kingdom predated the bengkok land institution, which was legallycodified under the Dutch colonial rule. In 1866, the Dutch colonial government decided to givethe village headmen an official piece of land (ambtelijk landbezit) in lieu of salary, which
proved to be an inexpensive and convenient means of administration and cooperation with thelocal economy. Later, with the introduction of the ethical policy “Inlandsch Gemeente
Ordonnantie” (Native Municipality Ordinance) in 1906, the provision of election for the village
headman and the village officers was constituted by law (Kano, 1994). Based on the 1883
colonial statistics, bengkok land occupied 13.9% of total farmland in Java excluding Batavia,
Yogyakarta, Surakarta, and Madura. The percentage was reduced to 5.9% in 1932 and thesimilar figure for the whole Java in 1932 was 6.0% 4. Looking at the absolute size, however,the same data source shows that the farmland classified as bengkok increased from 340,000 ha
in 1882 to 360,000 ha in 1932 in Java excluding Batavia, Yogyakarta, Surakarta, and Madura.
After independence, local administration at the village level in rural Java continued to use
bengkok land as in-kind payments to reward village officials 5 . Some of village-level casestudies provide details on bengkok land during the Soehrato era. Kano (1981), in a village in
Yogyakarta in 1976, found that bengkok land occupied 13% of total wet land for paddy in thevillage and 6% of the total area of the village, which was not very different from other villagesin Yogyakarta. From 80 households surveyed by him in detail, 15 cases of bengkok transactions
were reported, classified into 1 case of self-cultivation, 11 cases of fixed rental tenancy, and 3
4

Data sources: Koloniaal Verslag van 1883 [Nederl. (Oost-) lndie.], Appendix P. for the 1882 value and IndischVerslag 1934 - II. Statistisch Jaaroverzicht van Nederlandsch-Indië, for the 1932 values. We appreciate the help
from Pierre van der Eng for obtaining these numbers. We converted the acreage in “bouw” using 0.71 ha per bouw
into the numbers in hectares.
5
In appendix 1, we provide a detail account of the origin and evolution of bengkok land.

4

cases of sharecropping. Kano (1994) investigates long-term changes in five villages in a districtin Central Java, surveying 500 households in 1990. He found that 8.8% of the total paddy fields
in the village were used as bengkok land. He also utilized historical records of the same village
and concluded that the percentage of bengkok land in the village land remained similar for 87
years from 1903 to 1990.
In contemporary Java, the government statistics from PODES provide us with some estimationof the geographic spread of bengkok land. Figure 1 shows that bengkok land is concentrated incentral areas of Java in 2000 6. In terms of provinces, Central Java, East Java, and Yogyakarta
are associated with dense existence of bengkok land. As Yogyakarta was not directly ruled by
the Dutch during the colonial period, the map suggests that core regions of the bengkok land
institution lies in Central Java with some western parts of East Java.

[Figure 1 is about here]

The geographic distribution shown in Figure 1 is consistent with historical observations.
Collecting information from an Indonesian Law book 7, Kammen (2003) reports that bengkok
land is found in the former Cirebon Residency of West Java, and in the entire region of Central
Java and East Java. Other independent research reports also support this geographic spread ofbengkok land. Using the 1868 Dutch survey data, Kano (1977) reported similar evidence on
the prevalence of bengkok land from Cirebon regency in the West Java to Madiun, Rembang,
Kediri, Surabaya, and Pasuruan residency in the East Java. In another study, Hefner (1990) andBooth and Sundrum (1981) highlighted more extensive spread of bengkok land in cultivating
riverine areas (sometimes up to 30% of village communal land) and less so in the highlands.
The unequal distribution of bengkok land was also partly due to the local customs at various
places, which influenced the terms and conditions of the reward that village headman andvillage officers enjoyed against their services (Kano, 1994).
There is another source of information on island-wide prevalence of bengkok land incontemporary Java: Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS). From microdata of IFLS 2014, we
found only 46 out of 1,127 landowning households in Central and East Java reporting to own
bengkok plots. Altogether, it is difficult to obtain enough observations to conduct an in-depth
study from any nation-wide sample survey that does not focus on the bengkok land institution.
The official statistics does not give detailed information on how bengkok land is used in
6

We also have data from PODES 2018, which was conducted in a time much closer to our survey. However, the
PODES 2018 dataset reports only a binary variable whether the village had any bengkok land and we found thevast majority of villages in Java replied “Yes”. As we think the acreage information is important, we compile themap from PODES 2000, for which the information on the size of bengkok land in each village was available.
7
Tanya Jawab Hukum Tanah (Questions and Answers about Land Law), Secretariat Bina Desa / Indhrra, 1975)
page 23.

5

villages, either. Only information available in PODES is the size or existence of area classified
as bengkok. Unfortunately, this limited information does not allow us to understand the
distribution among different administrators 8 , actual use of bengkok land including renting
through fixed-rental tenancy or sharecropping, terms and conditions of subletting, and its
relation to village-level politics.

3. The Survey
We designed and conducted a primary survey in 2018. The purpose of the survey was to collectdetailed information on bengkok land at different levels of villages, households, andagricultural plots, covering wider geographical areas beyond case studies. The survey wasadministered by SurveyMETER using structured questionnaires differently designed for thevillage, the tenant household, and the landlord household. During the period from 28 February
to 10 April 2018, interviews were conducted by enumerators trained by SurveyMETER using
the method of computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI). Enumerators were equipped with
CAPI-installed laptops in the field so that measurement error in interview and data entry was
minimized.

3.1. Village Survey
We decided to focus on Central Java and East Java because bengkok land is more prevalent inthese two provinces and they were under the same direct rule during the Dutch colonial period.
From government statistics, we first listed rural districts (kabupaten 9) where the bengkok land
institution is prevalent and the main crop is paddy. This resulted in ten districts in the easternpart of Central Java (Wonogiri, Klaten, Sukoharjo, Karanganyar, Sragen, Rembang, Pati,
Semarang, Magelang, and Purworejo) and three districts in the western part of East Java
(Ngawi, Magetan, and Nganjuk). It should be noted that districts Semarang and Magelang inCentral Java replaced the initial selections of Grobogan and Kudus, and district Nganjuk inEast Java replaced the initial selection of Madiun because of the recent implementation of
district laws in Grobogan, Kudus, and Madiun that have abolished or replaced the bengkok
land institution. As our research questions and research design were rendered irrelevant in these8

IFLS has some information on this aspect. In IFLS5, 79 enumeration areas in Java reported non-zero bengkok
land: Its median of the percentage of bengkok land allocated to village head is 23%, the median for village
secretary and other officials is between 5-7% each, and the median percentage allocated to each dusun head isaround 6-9% each (which adds up to 37% of all bengkok for all dusun heads). The distribution is similar to ourfindings reported in Section 4,
9
In Indonesia, districts are classified into two types: kabupaten districts, which mostly prevail in rural areas andthe majority of its villages are known as desa where village heads are directly elected, and kota districts, whichmostly prevail in urban areas and the majority of its villages are known as kelurahan where village heads areappointed by the district mayor. Martinez-Bravo (2014) utilizes the difference between desa and kelurahan to
identify the impact of elections in Indonesian local politics. Our survey covered desa villages in kabupaten
districts.

6

districts, we replaced these districts with other districts following the original criteria that they
are in the center of paddy production in Central and East Java where bengkok institution is stillin place.
From each district, two sub-districts (kecamatan) were selected. The selection of sub-districts
was based on the farmland characteristics. Within each district, using the most recent
agricultural statistics, we first excluded sub-districts where the area of the dry farmland is larger
than that of the wet farmland. From the remaining sub-districts, we randomly selected two subdistricts to be our sample. The resulting 26 sub-districts in 13 districts are mapped in Figure 2.
It matches well with Figure 1 in the sense that our study areas fall on those with denser presenceof bengkok land.

[Figure 2 is about here]

Within each sub-district, we selected roughly five villages (desa). The selection procedure issimilar to the selection of sub-districts. Using the most recent agricultural statistics, we firstexcluded villages where the area of the dry farmland is larger than that of the wet farmland andthen we randomly selected villages as far as the village had bengkok land. In some of thesample sub-districts where the eligible villages were too few, we selected three or four villages,
compensated by nearby sample sub-districts in which more than five villages were selected.
We also replaced several villages of initial selection when we found that most of bengkok landin these villages was rented out to individuals or companies producing sugarcane inplantations. 10 This happened more frequently in district Rembang. Through this procedure, we
selected 130 villages spanning over 26 sub-districts in 13 districts of Central Java and East Java
provinces. These sample villages are thus from the pool of villages that were in rice producing
areas and bengkok institution was in place.
The village questionnaire included questions on the roster of village administrators (pamong
desa or perangkat desa), village elections, village population, land allocation, infrastructure,
agriculture and industries, and experiences of natural disasters. The village administrators are

10

It is noteworthy to mention that our survey mainly covered wet paddy producing villages, whereas the districts
under this study are also major sugarcane producing region. We thank Hitoshi Yonekura for bringing this issue
into our attention as sugarcane plays an important role in village land allocation especially in East Java. We do
not consider villages that grow sugarcane for two reasons. First, the sugarcane industry in Indonesia collapsed
during the Great Depression and have not recovered since then (Dell and Olken, 2020). Since then, the relative
importance of paddy has been significantly higher than sugarcane in the Indonesian agriculture (more informationon this can be found here:https://www.pertanian.go.id/home/?show=page&act=view&id=61). Second, one of themain objectives of this study was to understand the differences, if any, between the farming system (including theterms and conditions of tenancy contracts) in bengkok plots and private plots that are predominantly small holders.
We found the choice of paddy producing villages suitable for this purpose.

7led by the village heads (kepala desa) 11. The village official roster covered all officials andincludes questions on name, position in the village, age, education, current and previous job
experiences, bengkok land and other allowance given, use of bengkok land, etc. Using thequestionnaire, interviews were conducted in the village office in most cases with several
respondents. The village dataset comprises 130 sample villages. It provides detailed
information on the bengkok land institution in villages where the institution is still in place,paddy is the main crop, and paddy is produced on bengkok land (either by the tenants or the
bengkok landlord). As these three criteria are robustly found throughout the history of bengkok
land institution reviewed in Section 2 and appendix 1, we judge that our sample shows areasonably well representation of the Javanese villages with bengkok land.

3.2. Household Survey
Two different surveys, one for tenant households and the other for landlord household, wereconducted to collect information at the household and plot levels. We provide details of thetenant household survey in appendix 2. Our final dataset contains complete information for asample of 913 tenant households from 130 study villages (7.02 tenant households per village
on average), classified under the following categories:(1) bengkok land sharecroppers (n =158),(2) bengkok land fixed-rental tenants (n = 364),(3) non-bengkok land sharecropper sample (n =199), and(4) non-bengkok land fixed-rental tenants (n = 192).
The details of the landlord household survey are provided in appendix 3. Our final dataset
contains complete information for 930 landlord households from 130 study villages (7.15
landlord households per village on average). Depending on the type of counterpart tenants, wehave following groups of landlords:(1) landlords renting to the bengkok sharecropper sample (n=160),(2) landlords renting to the bengkok fixed-rental tenant sample (n=372),(3) landlords renting to the non-bengkok sharecropper sample (n=202), and(4) landlords renting to the non-bengkok fixed-rental tenant sample (n=196).
The information from these 1,843 households provides detailed information on the bengkok
land institution, 913 households from the perspective of tenants and 930 from the perspectivesof landlords. Although they are not strictly a random sample of all households in these villages,
the household-level and plot-level information will give us valuable insights regarding thebengkok institution.

11

Under the 2014 Village Law, which prevailed during our survey time, village heads are directly elected byvillagers, each term is six years and the maximum is three terms (term eligibility). There is also age eligibility thatcandidates for the village head should be 25 years old or older.

84. Incidence of Bengkok Land at the Village Level
The village-level data on land are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. In terms of absolute size
(Table 1), we focus on two measures shown in bold fonts. First, the sum of bengkok plots
allocated to the current village officials 12 (row a’) has a mean of 12.4 ha (standard deviation of
7.6 ha). As its distribution is skewed (see Figure 3 below), its median of 10.0 ha is much lower
than the mean. The figure demonstrates a large heterogeneity across villages. Second, the totalof village-owned land available for bengkok use, including land for dusun (hamlet) heads andsupporting staff (sum of a., b, c. in Table 1), has a mean of 28.1 ha (standard deviation of 28.0ha) and a median of 20.2 ha. Approximately two-thirds of bengkok land is for village officials,
the rest going to dusun heads with a small portion to supporting staff. In addition to bengkok
land, village-owned land is allocated to retired officials, village treasury land, andcommunal/public use 13. The total of village owned land has a mean of 47.3 ha (median of 30.6
ha).

[Table 1 is about here]

In the same table, the incidence of bengkok land is shown in terms relative to the average landsize of villages (total land, agricultural land, and wet farmland) among 130 villages. Sum of
bengkok plots allocated to current village officials occupied 3.8% of the total area of the village,
5.4% of agricultural land, and 6.9% of wet land (for paddy production). Total land available
for bengkok use occupied 8.6% of the total area of the village, 12.1% of agricultural land, and15.6% of wet land. These numbers are not different from historical and case study numbers
reviewed in Section 2.

[Figure 3 is about here]

The relative importance of bengkok land can be seen from a different angle. Instead of dividing
the mean bengkok size by the mean total land size, we first calculate shares for each village
and then aggregate them. The results are shown in Table 2. The share of bengkok plots allocatedto current officials occupied 4.6% of the total area of the village, 7.0% of the total agricultural
12

In this section, “village officials” refer to those village administrators working in the village office (heads,
secretaries, and department heads). Although heads of dusun (sub-village) are formally a part of village
administration under the 2014 Village Law, we separately treat them in tables on bengkok land.
13This includes village-owned land known as titisara. Land rents from such land are included in the village
revenue as kas desa (Yonekura, 1996).

9

land, and 9.0% of the total wet land on average. When we look at the total village-owned landavailable for bengkok use, the percentages become almost double. Comparing the number ofmeans and medians reported in Table 2 with those reviewed in Section 2, it is suggested that
our sample represents villages where bengkok shares are slightly higher than the average acrossJava. This reflects our sampling design. What is worth noting is that even within our sampled
villages, the heterogeneity across villages is large.

[Table 2 is about here]

The across-village heterogeneity is shown in another way in Figure 4, which indicates thetendency for smaller villages to have a higher share of bengkok land. The size of bengkok land
tends to be larger in larger villages in terms of land size, but the increasing rate is less thanproportional. As a result, there is a negative correlation between the bengkok land share andthe village size.

[Figure 4 is about here]

Information reported as (a’) in Tables 1-2 can be disaggregated into different officials, totaling
893 village officials in 130 villages (Table 3). All villages had heads and secretaries but
information for village secretaries was incomplete for 10 villages. Out of these 893 officials,
192 (21.5%) were elected through elections, 373 (41.8%) had another job in addition to theofficial post, and 820 (91.8%) received bengkok land.

[Table 3 is about here]

Regarding the election versus other appointment methods, in all of 130 villages, village heads
were subject to direct elections under the 2014 Village Law. However, in five villages, thevillage head was appointed due to the loss of former village heads, resulting in the number ofelected village heads at 125. Although the term of a head is the same at six years, due to thenon-synchronization of village head elections, we have variation in the timing of next election:
the months until the next election had a mean of 19.7 months, standard deviation of 16.2 months,
minimum 3 months, and maximum 69 months. Except for four cases (3.3%), village secretaries
were appointed, not elected by villagers. Among other village officials, most of whom were
heads of village departments, approximately 10% of them were elected by villagers. In otherwords, most village secretaries and other village officials were not subject to direct elections
by villagers but appointed by the village head. Even when they were elected, elections were10

informal ones outside the 2014 Village Law and were synchronized with the elections for heads.
Therefore, elections for village heads are expected to affect how bengkok plots are usedirrespective of the position of the official in the village administration hierarchy.
Approximately 50% of village heads had side jobs in addition to the village administration
work. The frequency of secretaries or other officials having side jobs was lower than that ofvillage heads, suggesting that these officials are more specialized in performing administrative
services to villagers.
The size of bengkok plot allocated to these officials varies substantially. Village heads 14
received the largest size of bengkok land, with the average size at 5.5 ha and median at 5 ha.
Out of 120 village secretaries, 94 (78.3%) received bengkok land, with average size at 2.4 ha,smaller than one half of what village heads received. Other village officials received 1.15 haof bengkok land on average, about one fifth of average bengkok land given to village heads.
The size differential in bengkok land between village heads and other officials can be seen in
Figure 5. Another interesting finding is the heterogeneity of village head’s bengkok size acrossvillages. The distribution is skewed with 12 heads with bengkok land equal to or larger than 10
ha.

[Figure 5 is about here]

How did these 820 officials manage their bengkok land? Table 4 summarizes this informationin the form of indicators whether the bengkok land was cultivated by themselves (A), rented toothers on a sharecropping contract (B), rented to others on a fixed rent contract (C), and others(V). When officials use their bengkok land in multiple ways, we indicate it as the combinationof alphabets A, B, C, and V. Unfortunately, the exact acreage under each use category is notavailable. There are nine categories shown in Table 4, with the most frequent one being “Fixed
rental only”, followed by “Own cultivation only” and “Own cultivation and fixed rental”. The
category of “Sharecropping only” is in the fourth position in terms of frequency.

[Table 4 is about here]

To account for the multiple usages, we summarize the patterns as the frequency percentages in
two ways in the lower panels of Table 4. First, to see the pure frequency distribution, we reportfrequency percentages without any weighting. Then we show numbers weighted by the size of
14

All of 130 village heads were eligible to receive bengkok land, but in one village, the actual allocation was not
yet implemented at the time of our survey. As a result, we obtain bengkok land information for 129 village heads
only.

11

bengkok land each official received. The weighted numbers of frequency are proxy for theacreage distribution (they become equal to acreage distribution if bengkok land is divided
equally among multiple uses for each bengkok landlord). Both aggregate figures confirm thatthe most common way for bengkok land usage is fixed rental tenancy, followed by own
cultivation.
One important finding from our survey is the difference among three types of village officials
regarding the use pattern of bengkok land. First, village heads and secretaries are less likely tocultivate bengkok land themselves than other officials. This indicates that these posts require
more work effort so that they have little time to work on the land. Village secretaries are
responsible for providing day-to-day administrative services to villagers. Second, village heads
are more likely to adopt sharecropping than secretaries and other officials. Our interpretationis that heads are more affected by the traditional norm of supporting landless and land-poorhouseholds through sharecropping than secretaries and other officials. Third, village heads’
tendency to adopt fixed rental is also the highest among the three official types. This can coexist with the second observation because the largest bengkok land is allocated to village heads(Table 3). As shown in last rows of each panel of Table 4, multiple uses of bengkok land aremost frequently found among village heads. When the size of bengkok land allocated to each
official becomes larger, the tendency for the official to use the land in multiple ways increases
and it becomes more likely to include fixed rental tenancy. By comparing the last panel(weighted) and the panel above (unweighted), the frequency of “Involving fixed rental” and“Multiple use” increases after weighting in all three types.
To conclude this section, we summarize the key findings. The village-level data showed
substantial heterogeneity in the incidence of bengkok land across villages. Fixed rental tenancy
is much more common than sharecropping when bengkok recipients (i.e., village officials)
sublet bengkok land. The tendency for self-cultivate bengkok land is strong, especially among
officials other than heads and secretaries. Village heads are more likely to adopt sharecropping.

5. Use of Bengkok Land and Tenancy Arrangements at the Household Level
5.1 Land Management by Sample Landlords
We first discuss the household-level analysis from the landlord side. The distribution of 2,500
plots of farmland owned by 930 sample landlord households is shown in Table 5. Reflecting
the sampling design, we have a higher concentration of plots in specific sampling categories:
bengkok sharecropped plots owned by landlords renting to bengkok sharecroppers (n=296),
bengkok fixed-rental plots owned by landlords renting to bengkok fixed-rental tenants (n=652),
private sharecropped plots owned by landlords renting to non-bengkok sharecroppers (n=358),
12

and private rented plots owned by landlords renting to non-bengkok fixed-rental tenants(n=275).
As shown in Table 5, other cells are also not negligible. For instance, as many as 49 bengkok
plots were rented out on fixed-rental basis among landlords sampled from the pool of landlords
renting to bengkok sharecroppers, and as many as 30 plots were rented out on sharecropping
basis among landlords sampled from the pool of landlords renting to bengkok fixed-rental
tenants. This indicates the co-existence of two types of tenancy arrangements within one
bengkok landlord, which is consistent with the existence of type ABC or BC in Table 4.
Another important finding from Table 5 is that private plots owned by bengkok landlord arealso important. Co-existence of sharecropping and fixed rental is found for private land as well.
As consistent with Table 4, Table 5 also shows that self-cultivation of bengkok plots is frequent.
Looking at the total of our sample (last column of Table 5), 202 out of 1,282 bengkok plots arecultivated by village officials themselves.

[Table 5 is about here]

To have a clearer picture of landholding patterns, we reclassify 930 landlords into three broader
categories of pure bengkok landlords (those who are provided with bengkok plots and owning
no private farmland), landowning bengkok landlords (those with both bengkok and private
farmland), and private landlords (those with private farmland but without bengkok land). By
construction, all samples from the first two sampling pools (n=160+372=534) are bengkok
landlords. In addition, 21 samples from the last two sampling pools were found to own bengkok
plots, resulting in the total sample of bengkok landlords, n=534+21=555, which is divided into
308 pure bengkok landlords and 247 landowning bengkok landlords. The size of non- bengkok
landlords is thus n = 930 – 555 = 375. It is worthwhile to note that many village officials withbengkok land belong to landless households.

[Table 6 is about here]

The size of private landholding is comparable between landowning bengkok landlords andprivate landlords: both have the median number of one plot and the average size of total private
landholding is around 0.5 ha (the difference is not statistically significant). The size of bengkok
landholding is comparable between pure bengkok landlords and landowning bengkok landlordsin terms of the median number (both have two bengkok plots) but landowning bengkok
landlords with 2 ha of bengkok land on average, significantly larger than 1.6 ha owned by purebengkok landlords. These indicate that size of bengkok land allocated to each official is large
in comparison to private landholding. Another point to note is the heterogeneity in landholding
13

size, both bengkok and private land, shown by the large standard deviation. Although notshown in the table, among bengkok landlords, there is a clear disparity between village heads
and other officials. The size of bengkok land per landlord is much larger for heads than forother officials in the landlord household data, as already discussed using the village-level data
(Table 3). Looking at private landholding, out of 247 landowning bengkok landlords in our
sample, 46 were village heads. Their average number of private plots was 2.89 plots (medianof 2 plots) and its average size was 0.78 ha (median of 0.48 ha), both of which are much larger
than reported in Table 6. This supports the standard view in the literature that village heads
were from village elite families (see Section 2). At the same time, out of 308 pure bengkok
landlords in our sample, 33 were village heads. This indicates that a substantial proportion ofvillage heads were from landless households. However, our dataset indicates that many of theselandless village heads are indeed wealthy. 15
The middle panel of Table 6 shows how these landlords use these plots in three categories:
self-cultivation, sharecropping out, and renting out on fixed rental. As multiple plots allow thehousehold to engage in more than one category, the sum of the percentages is greater than
100%. Self-cultivation is observed from about 30% of bengkok landlords, with slightly larger
percentage for those with private land. This may reflect the higher engagement in farming by
these landowners. The percentage of self-cultivation of private plots is much higher among
landowning bengkok landlords than the percentage of self-cultivation of bengkok plots. This
indicates that when a landowning household becomes a bengkok land recipient, it is more likely
to rent out the bengkok plots than their own private plots. The reason for this is worth further
analysis. Although not reported, tendency to use sharecropping rather than fixed rental
increases when we restrict the bengkok landlord sample into village heads only. For bengkok
plots, this is simply a confirmation of what we already discussed using Table 4 but similartendency exists for private plots of land owned by bengkok landlords.
The three types of landlords are different in other dimensions as well. As shown in the last
panel of Table 6, private landlords had smaller household size, higher frequency of having
female heads, less educated than bengkok landlords, and with lower level of assets than
bengkok landlords, the difference is significant at the 1% level. This indicates that a substantial
proportion of private landlords rent out their land to tenants due to the shortage of manpower
within their household, including the shortage due to the life-cycle reason. The disparity in

15
It is possible that such landless village heads belong to a landowning family but due to the life-cycle reason,
their household did not own land at the time of our survey. It is also possible that such landless village heads makeliving from non-agricultural sources with high returns. We collected the information on village heads’ side jobs
but not the earnings from them. We therefore cannot directly investigate income levels of these households.
Looking at the asset ownership, however, we found that 26 of the 33 village heads who are landless are in the top
wealth quintile of all our respondents combined. The average asset index scores (compare with the last row ofTable 6) among 33 landless village heads was 1.80 and that among 46 landowning village heads was 1.82 (thedifference is statistically insignificant). These provide a support that most of these landless village heads are
wealthy.

14

household size and education becomes slightly larger when we restrict bengkok landlords tovillage heads only.

5.2. Land Management by Sample Tenants
The distribution of 2,652 plots of farmland owned or rented-in by 913 sample tenanthouseholds is shown in Table 7. Reflecting the sampling design, we find concentration of
bengkok sharecropped plots rented-in by tenants sampled as a bengkok sharecropper (n = 184),
concentration of bengkok fixed-rental plots rented-in by tenants sampled as a bengkok fixedrental tenant (n = 476), concentration of private sharecropped plots rented-in by tenants
sampled as a non-bengkok sharecropper (n = 341), and concentration of private rented plots
rented-in by tenants sampled as a non-bengkok fixed-rental tenant (n = 315). As shown in thetable, however, other cells are not negligible. For instance, as many as 12 bengkok plots wererented in on fixed-rental basis among tenants sampled from the pool of bengkok sharecroppers,
and six plots were rented in on sharecropping basis among tenants sampled from the pool ofbengkok fixed-rental tenants. This indicates the co-existence of two types of tenancy
arrangements within one bengkok tenant, mostly from different bengkok landlords, a finding
not reported elsewhere. Another important finding from Table 7 is that these bengkok tenanthouseholds also own many private plots cultivated by themselves. Furthermore, similar coexistence of sharecropping and fixed rental is found for private land as well. The last row ofTable 7 indicates the average farm size of 2.85 plots (2,605 plots divided by 913), out of which
28.3% were owned plots, 27.7% were rented-in plots on sharecropping, and the rest (44.0%)
were rented-plots on fixed rental.

[Table 7 is about here]

To gain more insights on land management patterns, we reclassify 913 tenants into four broader
categories focusing on whether bengkok plot is rented-in (bengkok tenants vs. non-bengkok
tenants) and whether the household owns private land. In the literature on land tenancy, thedistinction of landed tenants (owner-cum-tenants) and pure, landless tenants is important due
to their completely different asset base (Otsuka, 2007). We follow this classification. By
construction, all samples from the first two sampling pools (n = 158 + 364 = 522) are bengkok
tenants. In addition, 43 samples from the last two sampling pools were found to rent-in bengkok
plots, resulting in the total sample of bengkok tenants, n = 522 + 43 = 565, comprising of 313
landowning tenants and 252 landless tenants. The size of non-bengkok tenants is thus n = 913– 565 = 348, comprising 173 landowning tenants and 175 landless tenants.

[Table 8 is about here]15

Table 8 summarizes landholding patterns using the above-mentioned classification of sample
tenants. The size of private land owned by land-owning tenant households is small, withmedian of one plot and the average size around 0.3 to 0.4 ha. The difference between bengkok
tenants and non-bengkok tenants is small (marginally significant at the 10% level). These
numbers are only slightly smaller than land ownership data shown in Table 6 for landlords. In
other words, in rural Java, the distance in asset positions between tenants and landlords is notlarge. Bengkok tenant households rented in one plot of bengkok land as median and its average
size was around 0.4 ha. The difference between landowning and landless households in termsof renting-in bengkok plots is not significant. The difference between landowning and landlessbengkok tenants in terms of renting-in private, non-bengkok land is not significant, either. As
a result, the size of farm operation (owned land + rented-in bengkok land + rented-in private
land － rented-out owned land) is much larger among landowning tenants compared to landlesstenants. In other words, tenancy arrangement does not equalize the landholding much. Anotherimportant finding from Table 8 is that the size of rented-in private land is larger among nonbengkok tenants than among bengkok tenants but the difference is not large enough tocompletely compensate for the additional land of bengkok plots cultivated by bengkok tenants.
As a result, the final farm size is significantly larger among bengkok tenants than among nonbengkok tenants, and this applies to both landless and landowning households. This suggeststhat tenancy through the bengkok land institution plays the role of bringing additional benefits
to land-poor households in a land-scarce economy of Java. In other words, bengkok landlords
can use bengkok plots to increase their vote bank through increasing the number of bengkok
tenants.
The lower panel of Table 8 shows how these tenant households use these plots in fivecategories: renting-out of owned plots, renting-in bengkok plots either through sharecroppingor fixed rental, and renting-in private plots either through sharecropping or fixed rentals. As allowner-cum-tenant households in our sample cultivated at least a part of their plots, we do notinclude the row for self-cultivation (100% for the two categories of owner-cum-tenants). As
multiple plots allow the household to engage in more than one category, the sum of thepercentages is greater than 100%. Among both bengkok tenants and non-bengkok tenants, thetendency to adopt sharecropping is significantly higher among landless households than among
landowning households. This confirms the view that poor, landless households cannot afford
fixed rental contracts with higher risk and necessity of advance payment so that they use
sharecropping, which has an implicit function of providing risk sharing and credit (Otsuka,2007). As shown in the last panel of Table 8, the four types of tenant households are somewhat
similar regarding the household size, incidence of female heads, and the head’s education.
Looking at the asset position, landowning tenants are much wealthier than landless tenants. It
is important to note that regardless of the type of tenant households, their education level and16the asset position are much lower than those of landlord households reported in Table 6. This
indicates that tenant households are much less wealthy than landlord households.

5.3. Terms and conditions for land tenancy
In this subsection, we report characteristics of terms and conditions for land tenancy using
information on rented-in plots cultivated by our sample tenant households. Similar information
can be obtained from rented-out plots owned by our sample landlord households but many ofthem are overlapping by the survey design and the information for the same contract reportedby the tenant and the landlord is mostly consistent. We also ignore a few cases of tenanthouseholds who rented out part of their owned land, because such cases are not common. The
dataset contains 207 bengkok sharecropping plots, 517 bengkok fixed rental plots, 512 nonbengkok sharecropping plots, 16 and 629 non-bengkok fixed rental plots. Some contract
parameters are common for fixed rental and sharecropping and others are different. We startwith common parameters.
Table 9 shows the size of the plot, its location, existence of written contract, relationship withthe landlord, length of contract, and responsibility of tenant/landlord in production decision
making. Plots under sharecropping tend to be smaller than plots under fixed rental, whose
difference is statistically significant. We do not find a particular pattern regarding the plot size
difference between bengkok and non-bengkok plots. Fixed rental plots are more likely to be a
wet land and irrigated plot, and less likely to be an upland plot. Here again, the sharecroppingvs. fixed rental contrast is significant while the bengkok vs. non-bengkok contrast is not.
Regarding the location of plots, non-bengkok plots are slightly more likely to be outside thevillage and the difference is statistically significant.

[Table 9 is about here]

The frequency of the landlord being a relative of the tenant is higher among sharecropping
plots than fixed rental plots and lower among bengkok plots than non-bengkok plots. The
difference is statistically significant in both dimensions. The reason for higher frequency ofsharecropping among relatives can be attributed to the lower transaction costs among relatives,
which may reduce asymmetric information problem that is associated more with sharecropping
than with fixed rental (Otsuka, 2007). Or it could be the case that sharecropping is more
reciprocal in nature and thus more suitable for land transactions among relatives. The reason
for lower frequency of bengkok plots among relatives can be attributed to the political

16

In Table 7, we report the number of non-bengkok sharecropping plots as 514. As two of such plots had
incomplete information on contract details, we drop them in the analysis of this subsection.

17

motivation of bengkok landlords to distribute benefits among non-relatives to improve theirpolitical positions in the village.
Another finding is that the frequency of written contracts is lower among sharecropping plots
than fixed rental plots and higher among bengkok plots than non-bengkok plots. The differenceis again statistically significant in both dimensions. The reason for lower frequency of written
contracts for sharecropping can be attributed to similar reasons above. The reason for higher
frequency of written contracts for bengkok plots could be due to the nature of bengkok withlimited tenure associated with the political cycle. The average length of the bengkok contract(both past record and future expectation) is shorter than that of the non-bengkok contract (thedifference is statistically significant). The tenure is also shorter among fixed rental contracts
than among sharecropping contracts. The percentage of tenants responding “I don’t know” tothe question of expected length in the future was higher among sharecroppers than among fixedrental tenants but no difference between bengkok and non-bengkok tenants. Finally, theinvolvement of landlords into tenants’ production decision is highly limited regardless ofcontract types. The landlord has no say about crop production on plots accounting for morethan 90% of plots in total. However, the percentage of cases with landlord involvement ishigher among sharecropping plots than among fixed rental plots, as expected from the standard
theory of land tenancy (Otsuka, 2007). The percentage of cases with landlord involvement isslightly higher among bengkok plots than among non-bengkok plots, but the difference is only
marginally significant at the 10% level. Overall, the information in Table 9 mostly supports theview of a more formal and business-like nature of fixed rental contracts than sharecropping.
Sharecropping is an arrangement in which the tenant and the landlord divide the output in theratio agreed upon ex ante 17. In the dataset, the tenant’s share in the output ranges from 25% to85%, with 50% as the median and the mode. In all contracts, labor cost is borne by the tenant.
There is variation regarding the sharing of fertilizer costs and seed costs. Table 10 shows the
combinations of output shares and input shares observed in our sample. Approximately 45%
of sharecropped plots had equal sharing (50%-50%) of output and all costs of seed and fertilizer
borne by the tenant. The percentage is similar between bengkok and non-bengkok plots. The
second most frequent pattern is cases where the tenant’s share in output is more than 50%(mostly two thirds) when all costs are borne by the tenant. This arrangement, which is morefavorable to tenants in comparison with the dominant one, is more frequently found among
non-bengkok plots than among bengkok plots. The case where fertilizer and seed costs areborne by the landlord is much less frequent.
Overall, the difference between bengkok and non-bengkok sharecropping plots is statisticallysignificant in the direction of more favorable terms to tenants on non-bengkok plots 18 .
17

The Javanese term for the share tenancy (bagi hasil in Indonesian) 50% tenant = maro (Javanese) / bagi dua(Indonesian); two-thirds or one-third tenant = mertelu (Javanese) / bagi tiga (Indonesian), 25% tenant = merapat(Javanese) / bagi empat (Indonesian), 85% tenant = moro pitu (Javanese) / bagi tujuh (Indonesian).
18
To have a sharper comparison, we calculated the net percentage of output that is paid to landlords as thesharecropping rent, assuming that the seed cost is 5% of the gross value of paddy output and the fertilizer cost is18

Therefore, our dataset does not indicate that sharecropping parameters of bengkok plots areadjusted to help resource-poor tenants. This does not mean, however, that bengkok
sharecropping does not help landless or land-poor households. In the land scarce economy ofJava, giving land-poor households access to land through bengkok sharecropping may givethem sufficient benefits even without adjustment of sharecropping parameters.
[Table 10 is about here]
Table 11 summarizes the information for the rental fee for fixed rental contracts. Most of themare paid for per-year basis and about 5% were defined as a seasonal rate 19. This is the same
regardless whether it is a bengkok plot or private plot. In more than 80% of the cases, the rent
is paid for one cropping season or for one year. But for the rest of the cases, the rent is paid in
advance for equal to or more than two seasons (years). Therefore, we normalize the rent in
1,000 Rp per season (year) per ha and report the resulting numbers in the lower panel of Table
11. The average level was around 6.9 million Rp. per ha per season for seasonal rents andaround 17 million Rp. per ha per year for yearly rents. Assuming two crops per year, the lastrows of Table 11 show summary statistics for appended observations. The rent level for
bengkok plots is slightly lower than that for non-bengkok plots. However, the difference is notstatistically significant. This suggests that there is no favorable treatment for bengkok plots as
far as the nominal level of land rent is concerned. In other words, we do not observe thereduction of the rent level below the market level to distribute additional benefits to bengkok
tenants. This may suggest that due to the land scarcity in Java, giving land-poor households
access to land through bengkok tenancy gives them sufficient benefits even without adjustmentof rental fees. However, as the level of land rent depends on land quality and we do not control
for these factors in the comparison of Table 11, the conclusion is highly tentative.
[Table 11 is about here]

So far in this section, we show household- or plot-level observations pooled across tenancy
types and across villages. Under this treatment, it is implicitly assumed that contracting parties
can choose different types of tenancy. However, if certain village-level institutional constraints
exist, they could limit the room for contract choice. Fortunately, this is not the case in our data.
We already noted the existence of within-household variation. Our sample includes cases
where landlord (or tenant) households are simultaneously involved in fixed rental andsharecropping contracts. The village-level data provides similar evidence as 62 out of 130
villages reported both sharecropping and fixed rental contracts on bengkok plots (elevenvillages were with sharecropping only and 57 villages were with fixed rental only). The
15% of the gross value of paddy output. The average among bengkok plots was 44.2% and that among nonbengkok plots was 43.0%, and the difference is statistically significant at the 5% level (p-value = 0.048).
19
Typically, land is rented out for the period specific to the growing season for a particular crop. In this sense, we
may call this a “crop-wise” rental rather than a seasonal rental.

19

existence of within-village variation can also be shown from the plot-level data. Using the 12
categories of sharecropping parameters in Table 10, we calculated how many of them wereobserved within each village. We found 64 villages with two or more categories ofsharecropping parameters (in 50 villages, uniform output and cost sharing ratios were adopted;
in 16 villages, no sharecropper sample was drawn in the tenant household survey). The
variation in fixed rents shown in Table 11 also includes substantial within-village variation.
Using the five categories of rental time unit, we found 2 or more categories in 74 villages. We
thus have substantial within-village variation in tenancy parameters, which is not reported
elsewhere.

6. Conclusion
Bengkok land is a unique institution prevalent in Java, Indonesia, in which the use rights ofvillage land are allocated to village administrators while they are in office as compensations
for their services. To gain more insights on how the farming practices and tenancy contractual
arrangements on bengkok plots differ from that in the private plots, we conducted a primary
survey in 2018 covering 130 villages and more than 1,800 households in Central Java and EastJava.
We found substantial heterogeneity in the size of bengkok land across villages. Fixed rental
tenancy was more common than sharecropping as tenancy choice, and in many villages selfcultivation of bengkok plots by officials themselves was evident. Furthermore, we foundlimited involvement of bengkok landlords into tenants’ decision making in production such as
choice of crops and inputs. Another notable finding was the absence of contract parameter
adjustments in favor of tenants when bengkok plots were rented out compared to private plots.
All these pieces of evidence suggest that the bengkok land management had more businesslike features. At the same time, we found that the average size of a farm operated by bengkok
tenants was larger than that of a farm operated by private tenants. Finally, evidence is consistent
with political cycles as the village heads, who potentially have reelection motives, offeredsharecropping contracts to non-relatives to garner a larger pool of supporters.
The overall picture indicates coexistence of different motivations in bengkok land managementby village officials. On the one hand, bengkok land serves as safety nets to support the
livelihoods of landless and land-poor households by providing them access to land throughtenancy contracts. On the other, it serves as in-kind reward system for public services renderedby the village administrators and allows them to extract economic returns from bengkok plots
as temporary landlords. It is imperative that we have a thorough understanding of theinteraction between these two mechanisms in light of political cycles in conjunction withperiodic village elections. Another potential area of further research is to gain insights on thesources of heterogeneity in bengkok land management practices across villages. We leave bothtasks for the future research.
20

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22

Figure 1: Distribution of Bengkok Land in 2000
Note: This map shows the percentage of bengkok land in the total area of each village,
averaged at the sub-district level.
Source: Drawn from the information in PODES 2000.

23

Figure 2: Districts and Sub-districts of the Study Areas
Note: The light brown segments show our sample sub-districts and the light green segments
surrounding them show the districts to which our sample sub-districts belong.
Source: SurveyMETER.

24

.1
Density
.05
0
0

10
20
30
Size of total Bengkok plots allocated to current village officials (ha)40

Figure 3: Distribution of the size of Bengkok land (ha) across 130 villages
Note: The figure shows the histogram of the sum of plots allocated to current officials, i.e., (a’) in
Table 1.
Source: Drawn by the authors using the survey data (same for the following tables).

25

Share (%) of Bengkok allocated to current officials
5
10
15
0
0

500
1000
Total land in the village (ha)1500

Figure 4: Correlation of the relative size of Bengkok land and the village size
Notes: The figure plots % of bengkok (sum of plots allocated to current officials, i.e., (a’) in Table 1) to total
land on the Y-axis against the X-axis of village size in total land (ha). The number of observations is 130
villages.

26

Figure 5: Size distribution of Bengkok landNote: Village heads (left) and all other officials (right)

27

Table 1: Prevalence of Bengkok Land across Sample Villages
Level (in ha)
Mean(S.D.)

Land owned by the village
a. Bengkok for village officials1
19.0(21.8)
a'. Bengkok actually allocated to
12.4
(7.6)
current village officials1
b. Bengkok for dusun (sub-village)
5.7
(7.8)
heads
c. Bengkok for supporting staff
3.4
(7.8)
d. Retired officials' land
0.5
(2.4)
e. Village Treasury Land
8.1
(14.0)
f. Communal/public use
10.5(24.4)
Total bengkok (sum of a, b, and c)
28.1(28.0)
Total village-owned land (sum of
47.3(47.7)
a,b,c,d,e, and f)
Total area of the village (private land and village-owned land)
Land used for agriculturea. Wet land, irrigated133.4 (104.1)
b. Wet land, unirrigated47.2(81.7)c. Dry land
51.2
(78.5)
Wet land, total (a.-b.)
180.6 (122.8)
Total agricultural land (a.-c.)
231.8 (172.8)
Non-agricultural land
96.7
(93.1)
Total area
328.5 (207.6)

Composition based onmean (%)

Median

12.0

5.8

8.2

10.5

10.0

3.8

5.4

6.9

3.5

1.7

2.5

3.2

0.0
0.0
3.4
2.5
20.2

1.0
0.2
2.5
3.2
8.6

1.5
0.2
3.5
4.5
12.1

1.9
0.3
4.5
5.8
15.6

30.6

14.4

20.4

26.2

118.5
3.2
17.6
145.5
178.6
74.1
276.4

40.6
14.4
15.6
55.0
70.6
29.4
100.0

100.0
100.0

Notes: The number of observations is 130. In the first panel, all information except (a') was taken from thevillage land question page that reports the classification of village-owned land. On the other hand, theinformation in (a') was taken from the village official question page that reports the actual usage of bengkok
land at the time of the survey. Therefore, (a) and (a') are close but not exactly the same ((a) is greater than (a') inmany cases but (a) is smaller than (a') in some cases).
1. Among village administrators defined by the Village Law of 2014, village officials except for dusun heads areincluded here.
Source: Prepared by the authors using the survey data (same for the following tables).

28

Table 2: Bengkok Land Incidence in Relative Terms
Ratio of total Bengkok/village land (%)
Mean
Bengkok actually allocated to current village officials (a'. of Table 1)
Ratio to total area of the village
4.6
Ratio to total agricultural land
7.0
Ratio to total agricultural land (wet land only)
9.0
Total bengkok (sum of a, b, and c of Table 1)
Ratio to total area of the village
10.6
Ratio to total agricultural land
15.2
Ratio to total agricultural land (wet land only)
20.6(S.D.)Median

(3.1)
(5.1)
(7.0)

3.9
6.0
7.1

(12.1)(16.1)(29.9)

6.5
9.9
12.9

Note: The number of observations is 130.

29

Table 3: Roster of Village Officials and Bengkok Land Allocation
Position in the village

Number of observations
Out of which:elected through elections
having employment in addition to the official post
were provided with bengkok land
Summary statistics of bengkok land allocated
NOB
Mean (ha)(Standard deviation)Median (ha)Total bengkok land allocated to these officials (in ha)(distribution: %)Villageheads

Villagesecretaries

Others(mostly
village deptheads)

130

120

643

893

125
67
129

4
42
94

63
264
597

192
373
820

129
5.51
(2.63)
5.00
710.6(43.9)

94
2.38(1.71)
2.06
223.5(13.8)

597
1.15(0.80)
0.90
684.3(42.3)

820
1.97(2.09)
1.00
1,618.4(100.0)Total

Note: Data for village secretaries exist for all 130 villages but the information on their appointment route,additional employment, and bengkok land was missing for 10 secretaries.

30

Table 4: Use of Bengkok Land by Village Officials
Position in the village
Villageheads

Villagesecretaries

Others(mostly
villagedeptheads)
597

Number of observations
129
94
Use of bengkok land (mutually exclusive categories, raw numbers)
A (Own cultivation only)
7
18
159
AB (Own cultivation and sharecropping)5
123
ABC (Own cultivation, sharecropping, fixed rental)
5013
AC (Own cultivation and fixed rental)
32
15
125
B (Sharecropping only)
26
17
81
BC (Sharecropping and fixed rental)
12918
C (Fixed rental only)
42
33
177
CV (Fixed rental and other)001
V (Other)0
1
0Patters of bengkok land usage (non-exclusive categories, frequency shares in %)Without weighting
Involved in own cultivation
38.0
36.2
53.6
Involved in sharecropping
37.2
28.7
22.6
Involved in fixed rental
70.5
60.6
55.9
Multiple ways to use
41.9
26.6
30.2
Weighted by the size of Bengkok plot
Involved in own cultivation
39.6
34.9
55.8
Involved in sharecropping
31.9
25.7
17.5
Involved in fixed rental
75.9
72.5
63.9
Multiple ways to use
42.6
33.2
34.6

Total

820
184
29
18
172
124
39
252
1
1

49.1
25.6
58.8
31.6
45.8
25.0
70.4
37.9

31

Table 5: Distribution of Plots Owned by Sample Landlords
Sampling type of landlords
Landlords
renting tothebengkoksharecroppersampleNumber of landlord observations
160
Bengkok plots allocated by the village
0. Own cultivation
36
1. Sharecropping296
2. Fixed rental
49
3. Not cultivated or others
11
Sub-total
392
Plots of private land owned by the household
0. Own cultivation
92
1. Sharecropping53
2. Fixed rental
8
3. Not cultivated or others
2
Sub-total155
Sum of two types of plots
0. Own cultivation
128
1. Sharecropping349
2. Fixed rental
57
3. Not cultivated or others
13
Total
547

Landlords
renting tothebengkok
fixedrental
tenantsampleLandlords
renting to
the nonbengkok
sharecropp
er sample

Landlords
renting to
the nonbengkok
fixed-rental
tenantsample

372

202

196

930

157
30
652
6
845

4
3
12
0
19

5
6
12
3
26

202
335
725
20
1,282

176
29
45
1
251

49
358
12
0
419

90
28
275
0
393

407
468
340
3
1,218

333
59
697
7
1096

53
361
24
0
438

95
34
287
3
419

609
803
1,065
23
2,500

Total

32

Table 6: Landholding of Sample Landlords
Landlord type(C)(A) Pure(B)
Landlord
bengkok Landowningowningbengkoklandlord
privatelandlord (w/(w/ofarmlandprivateprivatebut without
farmland) farmland)
bengkokp-value fortesting theequality ofmeans1
Total(A)=(B) (B)=(C)

Number of landlord observations
308
247
375
930
Number of private plots owned by the household
Mean
0
1.89
2.01
1.31
n.a. 0.419
S.D.
0
1.82
1.74
1.72
Median0
1
1
1
Total acreage of private plots owned by the household (ha)
Mean
0
0.49
0.48
0.32
n.a. 0.833
S.D.
0
0.76
0.49
0.55
Median
0
0.25
0.33
0.18
Number of Bengkok plots allocated to the household
Mean
2.19
2.45
0
1.38 0.144
n.a.
S.D.
1.41
2.47
0
1.89
Median2201
Total acreage of Bengkok plots allocated to the household (ha)
Mean
1.64
2.07
0
1.09 0.019
n.a.
S.D.
1.75
2.42
0
1.84
Median
1.00
1.12
0
0.60
% of households involved in the following:
Bengkok plots, self-cultivated
27.0
34.8
0
18.2 0.047
n.a.
Bengkok plots, sharecropped out
31.5
37.3
0
20.3 0.158
n.a.
Bengkok plots, fixed rental
79.6
71.3
0
45.3 0.025
n.a.
Non-Bengkok plots, self-cultivated
0
66.0
19.5
25.4
n.a. 0.000
Non-Bengkok plots, sharecropping
0
29.2
56.0
30.3
n.a. 0.000
Non-Bengkok plots, fixed rental
0
20.2
51.2
26.0
n.a. 0.000
Household (hh) characteristics
Average hh size in number
4.12
4.21
3.34
3.83 0.471 0.000% of female-headed households
3.6
1.2
30.4
13.8 0.064 0.000
Average age of household heads
48.2
49.7
59.7
53.2 0.037 0.000
Average years of schooling of heads
12.37
12.10
8.13
10.59 0.196 0.000
Asset index score2
0.765
0.930
-0.2460.401 0.108 0.000
Notes: 1. "p-value for testing the equality of means" is based on t-tests for the null hypothesis that the twogroups have the same mean, allowing for unequal variance. "n.a." means "not applicable by construction oflandlord types".
2. "Asset index score" is the predicted value of the first principal component, aggregating 13 dummy variables
for the household ownership of each asset (the loading coefficients, all positive, were estimated from the pooled
sample of both tenant and landlord households). Its mean is zero, SD is 1.647, minimum is -6.06, and maximum
is 4.67 (n=1,843).

33

Table 7: Distribution of Plots Owned or Rented-in by Sample Tenants
Sampling type of tenants
BengkokNonfixedBengkok
bengkokrentalsharecropper
sharecropper
tenantsamplesamplesampleNumber of tenant observations
Plots of private land owned by the household
0. Own cultivation
1. Rented out on sharecropping
2. Rented out on fixed rental
Sub-total
Bengkok plots rented-in from village officials
1. Sharecropping
2. Fixed rental
Sub-total
Plots of private land rented-in from others
1. Sharecropping
2. Fixed rental
Sub-total
Total plots in the tenant data
Plots cultivated by the household
0. Cultivation of owned plots
1. Sharecropping(bengkok+private)
2. Fixed rental(bengkok+private)
Total

Nonbengkok
fixedrental
tenantsample

Total

158

364

199

192

913

93
2
4
99

357
11
22
390

118
1
5
124

170
0
2
172

738
14
33
785

184
12
196

6
476
482

15
9
24

2
20
22

207
517
724

79
18
97
392

59
272
331
1,203

341
24
365
513

35
315
350
544

514
629
1,143
2,652

93

357

118

170

738

263

65

356

37

721

30

748

33

335

1,146

386

1,170

507

542

2,605

34

Table 8: Landholding of Sample Tenants
Tenant typeBengkoktenant,landowning

Bengkoktenant,landless

Nonbengkok
tenant,landowning

Number of tenant observations
313
252
173
Number of private plots owned by the household
Mean
1.69
0
1.49
S.D.
1.36
0
0.91
Median1
01
Total acreage of private plots owned by the household (ha)
Mean
0.40
0
0.33
S.D.
0.59
0
0.61
Median0.20
00.18
Number of bengkok plots rented-in by the household
Mean
1.28
1.28
0
S.D.
0.67
0.68
0
Median1
10
Total acreage of bengkok plots rented-in by the household (ha)
Mean
0.48
0.44
0
S.D.
0.46
0.59
0
Median0.33
0.30
0Number of non-bengkok plots rented-in by the household
Mean
0.88
0.90
1.85
S.D.
2.22
1.82
1.52
Median001
Total acreage of non-bengkok plots rented-in by the household (ha)
Mean
0.25
0.28
0.40
S.D.
0.88
1.21
0.38
Median000.28
Number of total plots cultivated by the household
Mean
3.73
2.18
3.29
S.D.
3.29
2.21
1.81
Median3
23
Total acreage of plots cultivated by the household (ha)
Mean
1.10
0.72
0.70
S.D.
1.50
1.61
0.61
Median
0.72
0.40
0.53

p-value for testing theequality of means1
Nonbengkok
tenant,landlessTotal(bengkok)= (nonbengkok)(landowning) =(landless)

175

913

0
0
0

0.86
1.20
1

0.052

n.a.

0
0
0

0.20
0.47
0.04

0.196

n.a.

0
0
0

0.79
0.82
1

n.a.

0.909

0
0
0

0.29
0.47
0.14

n.a.

0.365

1.82
1.16
1

1.25
1.87
1

0.000

0.681

0.39
0.33
0.30

0.31
0.85
0.15

0.005

0.719

1.82
1.16
1

2.85
2.56
2

0.002

0.000

0.39
0.33
0.30

0.78
1.28
0.50

0.000

0.000

(to be continued)

35

Table 8: Landholding of Sample Tenants (continued)
Tenant typeBengkoktenant,landowningp-value for testing theequality of means1

Bengkoktenant,landless

Nonbengkok
tenant,landowning

Nonbengkok
tenant,landless

11.18

0

3.47

0

27.16

38.10

0

75.40

64.68

18.21

Total
(bengkok)= (nonbengkok)(landowning) =(landless)

4.49

0.001

n.a.

0

19.82

n.a.

0.006

0

0

43.70

n.a.

0.006

24.21

50.87

64.00

34.83

0.000

0.001

27.48

27.78

61.27

47.43

37.79

0.000

0.253

3.82
1.9
55.6
7.08
-0.187

3.76
2.8
53.3
6.65
-0.609

3.58
1.7
55.7
6.69
-0.312

3.48
3.4
55.2
6.27
-0.613

3.69
2.4
54.9
6.73
-0.409

0.007
0.788
0.228
0.151
0.371

0.352
0.249
0.038
0.105
0.000

% of households involved in the following:
Owned plots, rented-out
Bengkok plots, sharecropped
in
Bengkok plots, rented in on
fixed rental
Non-bengkok plots,
sharecropped in
Non-bengkok plots, rented
in on fixed rental
Household (hh) characteristics
Average hh size in number% of female-headed hh
Average age of hh heads
Avg ys of schooling of heads
Asset index score2
Notes: 1. and 2. See notes to Table 6.

36

Table 9: Terms and Conditions of Plots Rented-in by Sample Tenant Households
Tenancy type of the plot

Bengkokland,sharecropping

Bengkokland,
fixed
rental

NonNonbengkok bengkok
land,
land,
fixed
sharerental
cropping1

p-value for testing theequality of means or
independence2
Total(share(bengkok)
cropping)= (non= (fixed
bengkok)rental)Number of plot observations
207
517
512
629
1,864
Size of the plot (ha)
Mean
0.24
1.27
0.47
1.03
0.85
0.270
0.000
S.D.
0.19
4.93
1.84
3.78
3.55
Median
0.20
0.32
0.16
0.20
0.21
Type of land (%)
0.993
0.000
Wet land, irrigated
51.7
63.3
57.2
62.6
60.1
Wet land, unirrigated
10.1
27.7
15.2
28.3
22.5
Upland
38.2
9.1
27.5
9.1
17.4
Location of land (%)
0.000
0.016
At the house
1.0
0.8
0.8
1.0
0.9
Same hamlet (dusun)
69.1
58.6
67.8
63.6
64.0
Same village (desa)
29.5
36.0
25.6
27.2
29.4
Different desa
0.5
4.6
5.9
8.3
5.7
Landlord is a relative? Yes (%)
30.4
23.6
45.1
25.8
31.0
0.000
0.000
Written contract? Yes (%)
3.4
32.1
1.2
25.8
18.3
0.000
0.000
3
Years since the start of cultivating the plot
Mean
5.76
4.33
7.14
4.32
5.26
0.001
0.000
S.D.
6.87
4.06
7.72
3.98
5.74
Median3
3
5
3
3
Years ahead expected to cultivate the plot
NOB
198
503
489
612
1802
(% who responded "I don't know")
(4.3)
(2.7)
(4.5)
(2.7)
(3.3)
Mean
7.43
5.36
8.30
6.25
6.69
0.005
0.000
S.D.
5.97
7.40
9.48
12.37
9.84
Median53545Does the landlord have any say on production decision? (%)
0.054
0.000
No
73.4
99.2
83.4
99.8
92.2
Yes on crop choice
4.4
0.6
1.0
0.0
0.9
Yes on input use
12.1
0.0
9.0
0.0
3.8
Yes on both
10.14
0.19
6.64
0.16
3.06
Notes: 1. In Table 7, we report the number of non-bengkok sharecropping plots as 514. As two of such plots had
incomplete information on contract details, we drop them in this table and the next.
2. "p-value for testing the equality of means" is based on t-tests for the null hypothesis that the two groups havethe same mean, allowing for unequal variance. "p-value for independence" is based on chi-squared tests for the
independence of row and column distributions.
3. There was one observation with missing information ("I don't know"), belonging to bengkok, fixed rental.

37

Table 10: Sharecropping Parameters Observed among Sample Tenant Households
Outputshare ofthetenantCost sharing (% is the share borne by
the tenant)Less than 50%1
All landlord
Sharing
All tenant
Equal to 50%
All landlord
Sharing (seed 0%, fertilizer 50%)
Sharing (seed 50%, fertilizer 50%)
Sharing (seed 100%, fertilizer 50%)
Sharing (others)
All tenant
More than 50%2
All landlord
Sharing
All tenant
Total

Bengkok plots

Non-bengkok
plots

5
0
1

2.4%
0.0%
0.5%

16
6
0

3.1%
1.2%
0.0%

21
6
1

2.9%
0.8%
0.1%

2
15
20
28
9
96

1.0%
7.2%
9.7%
13.5%
4.3%
46.4%

1
10
24
56
30
228

0.2%
2.0%
4.7%
10.9%
5.9%
44.5%

3
25
44
84
39
324

0.4%
3.5%
6.1%
11.7%
5.4%
45.1%

0
1
30
207

0.0%
0.5%
14.5%
100.0%

1
15
125
512

0.2%
2.9%
24.4%
100.0%

1
16
155
719

0.1%
2.2%
21.6%
100.0%

Total

Notes: p-value for testing the independence of row and column distributions by a chi-squared test is 0.000.
1. Out of these 28 observations, 13 with 25%, 5 with 30%, 2 with 33% (one third), and 8 with 40%.
2. Out of these 172 observations, 60 with 60%, 101 with 67% (two thirds), 45 with 70%, 10 with 75%, and 1with 85%.

38

Table 11: Fixed Rental Rates Observed among Sample Tenant Households

Bengkok plots

Non-bengkok
plots

Total

p-value fortesting theequality ofmeans orindependence
1Time unit of rental

0.127

Seasonal, single crop
period

17

3.3%

34

5.4%

51

4.5%

Seasonal, multiple crops
period

2

0.4%

5

0.8%

7

0.6%

Annual, single year
422
81.6%
Annual, multi years
76
14.7%
Other (gadai tanah)
0
0.0%
Total
517
100.0%
Rent for seasonal rental (1,000 Rp/ha/season)

477
111
1
628

76.0%
17.7%
0.2%
100.0%

899
187
1
1,145

78.5%
16.3%
0.1%
100.0%

NOB
19
39
58
Mean
6,865
6,894
6,884
S.D.
4,259
5,095
4,800
Median
6,071
5,952
5,976
Rent for annual rental (1,000 Rp/ha/year)
NOB
498
588
1,086
Mean
16,655
17,133
16,914
S.D.
10,721
12,216
11,552
Median14,286
16,212
15,590Appended data, assuming 2 cropping seasons per year (1,000 Rp/ha/year)
NOB
517
627
1,144
Mean
16,54816,925
16,754
S.D.
10,656
12,12011,478Median14,286
16,00015,134

0.982

0.493

0.576

Notes: In this table, one observation in the category of "Non-Bengkok plots" was deleted because the reported
level of rent was 0 Rp. Rent was then calculated for 1,144 observations, excluding one case of gadai tanah (landpawning contract).
1. "p-value for testing the equality of means" is based on t-tests for the null hypothesis that the two groups havethe same mean, allowing for unequal variance. "p-value for independence" is based on a chi-squared test for the
independence of row and column distributions.

39

Appendix 1. The origin and evolution of bengkok land
While disputes remain about its origin (Moertono, 1968; Soetrisno, 1993), according to manyscholars (Tjondronegoro, 2013), an old system of appanage land from the precolonial Javanese
kingdom predated the bengkok land institution, which was legally codified under the Dutchcolonial rule. During his tenure between 1830 and 1833, Governor-General Van den Bosch
drafted a plan to enable the Dutch entrepreneurs to establish estates (cultuurmaatschappijen)
in forested areas of Java as land was made available on lease for a 21.5-year term. The systemof estates cultivating agricultural (mainly cash crop) products soon became profitable for theEuropean investors. Many Dutch banks including the Dutch Trading Association(Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij), the Escompto Bank, and the Commercial Bank
(Handelsbank) started financing these agricultural estates in Java and Sumatra. In a few years,
the number of companies increased to 227 (with a total capital of 29.8 million guilders), of
which 64 were based in the Netherlands, and the rest from the Netherlands Indies(Tjondronegoro, 2013).
In 1866, the Dutch colonial government decided to give the village headmen an official pieceof land (ambtelijk landbezit) in lieu of salary, which proved to be an inexpensive andconvenient means of administration and cooperation with the local economy. Later, with theintroduction of the ethical policy “Inlandsch Gemeente Ordonnantie” (Native Municipality
Ordinance) in 1906, the provision of election for the village headman and the village officers
was constituted by law, which stated “the revenue for public organization to the village
headman and other village officers, whether in the form of ambtelijk landbezit, or in other waysof performing services (dienstverrichtingen), as long as it is feasible and desirable for the
benefit of residents, based on the consideration of the prefectural administrative chiefs (Article3)” (Kano, 1994). At that time, the village headman and village officers also enjoyed various
labor services by the villagers.
There is a consensus among historians that under the Cultivation System introduced by the
Dutch government, landholdings of the village government increased (Elson, 1994). Due totheir higher social rank, village heads usually rented out bengkok land to landless or land-poorhouseholds. Dell and Olken (2020) regarded the expansion of village land including bengkok
during the colonial period as an important component of strengthening the Cultivation System.
After independence, local administration at the village level in rural Java continued to use
bengkok land as in-kind payments to reward village officials. While labor service practices
were gradually abolished (Kano, 1994), the bengkok land system was continued as the maincompensation for village administrators. Mortimer (1974) noted that following independence
the practice of bengkok land not only continued but has also been extended by reclassifying
communal land in villages that did not have bengkok land before. Such acts corroborated thelegacy of class domination in rural politics that continued since the Dutch colonial times.
40

The diverse and more or less autonomous village governance continued until the Soeharto era,
when the New Order regime started to incorporate villages into state administration by
providing villages with uniform structure and clear hierarchy to have more control over villages(Antlov, 2003). The top-down approach to rural development increased the reach of the state
into village governance (Hardjono,1983). During this era (especially after 1971), efforts weremade to reclassify communal land in villages with little or no bengkok land to create a more
equitable distribution of bengkok land across Java. For example, in Jember (a district in East
Java), in 1994, the district government allocated funds to purchase additional bengkok land forvillages that had too little (Soetrisno, 1993). In another study, White and Wiradi (1979),
compared data on bengkok land collected in the 1970s with that from the 1860s, and found aconsiderable increase in the number of villages with bengkok land in Priangan (West Java).
Some of village-level case studies provide details on bengkok land during the Soehrato era.
Village studies conducted by Hiroyoshi Kano, a Japanese economist specialized in Indonesianstudies, are particularly worth mentioning because of detailed reports on how bengkok land
was operated and its relationship with local politics. From his surveys in a village in
Yogyakarta in 1976 (Kano, 1981), he found that bengkok land occupied 13% of total wet landfor paddy in the village and 6% of the total area of the village, which was not very different
from other villages in Yogyakarta. From 80 households surveyed by him in detail, 15 cases ofbenkok transactions were reported, classified into 1 case of self-cultivation, 11 cases of fixedrental tenancy, and 3 cases of sharecropping. Kano (1994) investigates long-term changes infive villages in a district in Central Java, surveying 500 households in 1990. He found that
8.8% of the total paddy fields in the village were used as bengkok land. He also utilized
historical records of the same village and concluded that the percentage of bengkok land in thevillage land remained similar for 87 years from 1903 to 1990.
During the 1980s and the 1990s there were sporadic attempts to replace the bengkok land
institution with fixed salary for village heads. But in most parts, these were half-hearted efforts
that failed to make any significant impacts (Kammen, 2003). After the fall of Soeharto in 1998,
the Law 22 of 1999 on Regional Administrations was introduced to decentralize thegovernment, giving much more autonomy not only to districts, but also to villages (Antlov
2003).
At the time of our survey in 2018, the Village Law of 2014 and regulations related with it werein force. The law makes it clear that village heads are elected directly by villagers for a tenureof six years, with the tenure restriction of the maximum of three terms. The 2014 Village Law
also made concrete suggestions to abolish the bengkok land institution, and instead village
headman and village officers to receive a stipulated monthly salary (penghasilan tetap), various
allowances (tunjangan) and medical benefits (jaminan kesehatan) from the financial resources
available at the subdistrict level (dana perimbangan) (Kano, 2017). In 2015, the government
started consolidating village funds (dana desa) in order to support salaries for the village
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administrators 20 (Lewis, 2015). Following the 2014 Village Law, the Government Regulation
43 was passed, which governs village assets so that the village officials will be paid fromvillage budget. This law did not explicitly mention about the future of bengkok land. However,under pressure from villages, in 2015 the Government Regulation 47 was also enacted, which
explicitly retain the status of bengkok land as additional means of support for village officials,
on top of the paid salary. This clearly marked a victory for the villages that called for thecontinuation of bengkok land. However, around this time some districts decided to get rid of
bengkok land. During our fieldwork in 2018, we found three out of thirteen districts that were
initially identified as core regions of the bengkok land institution had just implemented districtlaws to abolish bengkok land (described in detail in section 3).

42Appendix 2. Tenant household survey framework
From each study village, we surveyed tenant households, and landlord households as theircounterparts. The number of sampled tenant households in each village was roughly inproportion to the population of tenants in the village, averaging seven samples per village. Landtenancy types include four broad categories: bengkok plots sharecropped, bengkok plots basedon fixed rental, non-bengkok plots (i.e., private land) sharecropped, and non-bengkok plots
based on fixed rental. To maximize within-village variation in contract types, we intentionallyselected different types of tenancy from each village so that all sample villages have tenants
renting in bengkok land and tenants renting in non-bengkok land on the one hand, andattempted to cover both sharecropping and fixed rental tenancies (if both types existed in thesame village) on the other.
Due to the non-availability of eligible households or refusal, some villages had fewer thanseven tenant households in our sample, compensated by additional households in nearby
sample villages. Throughout the fieldwork, whenever the availability of landlord/farmer types
was not ideal, detailed notes were documented about each case and the decision made.
Our final dataset contains complete information for a sample of 913 tenant households from130 study villages (7.02 tenant households per village on average), classified under thefollowing categories:(5) bengkok land sharecroppers (n =158),(6) bengkok land fixed-rental tenants (n = 364),(7) non-bengkok land sharecropper sample (n =199), and(8) non-bengkok land fixed-rental tenants (n = 192).
However, landless or land-poor households can rent in plots from both bengkok and nonbengkok landlords simultaneously. From our sampling strategy, those tenant households who
were chosen from the category bengkok sharecroppers may rent in additional land from nonbengkok landlords, and those chosen from the category of non-bengkok fixed-rental tenants
may rent in additional land from bengkok landlords. This is an important aspect of the bengkok
land institution, which is neither mentioned in other studies nor available from government
statistics. Section 5 explains it in greater detail.
In the tenant household questionnaire, the household roster includes questions on educationand occupation of each member. The other sections collect information on assets including
agricultural machinery, livestock, household durables, etc.; land ownership and management;
cropping pattern and outputs, details of crop production; debts and credits; non-agricultural
income sources, and finally the Raven’s progressive matrices to measure logical reasoning

43

ability of the respondent. 21 The respondent was the household head in most cases, interviewed
at their home.
We collected plot-level information in two different ways.
First, the ownership or tenancy status of all kinds of farmland was collected at the plot level
and the information covered all plots either owned (self-cultivated or rented-out) or rented-inby the tenant household. We collected detail information on land size, land quality, location,
procedures of acquisition of privately owned land, details of rental terms and conditions if an
owned plot is rented out or a plot owned by others is rented in. All our 913 sample households
manage to have at least one plot. The resulting dataset contains information on 2,652 plots(2.90 plots per household on average).
Second, details of crop production such as material inputs, family labor, hired labor, output
disposal, etc. were collected from two representative plots of the sample tenant households. If
the household manages only one or two plot(s), we collected information from these plots. If
the household manages more than two plots, we chose plots on which paddy was produced in
the last cropping season and plots belonging to different types of tenancy, with larger plots
given a priority. A plot managed by our sample tenant household is either a plot under bengkok
sharecropping, a plot under non-bengkok sharecropping, a plot under bengkok fixed-rental
tenancy, a plot under non-bengkok fixed-rental tenancy, or a plot owned by the tenant. By thisstrategy, we attempted to have within-household variation in contract types. The resulting
dataset contains detailed crop production data on 1,692 plots operated by our 913 sample
households (1.85 plots per household on average).
The information from these 913 households provides detailed information on the bengkok land
institution from the perspective of tenants. Although they are not strictly a random sample of
all tenant households in these villages, the household-level and plot-level information will give
us valuable insights regarding the institution and its impact on productivity.

21

The twelve Raven’s Matrices used in this study are a subset of Raven’s Coloured Progressed Matrices designed
to measure abstract reasoning and parts of fluid intelligence (Raven, 2000). The same subset of questions has
been used in other surveys in Indonesia such as IFLS.

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Appendix 3. Landlord household survey framework
We surveyed landlords who rent their land (including bengkok land under their control) to eachof our sample tenant households. This suggests we aimed to contact landlord households ineach village who are tied to four categories of tenant households (bengkok sharecroppers,
bengkok fixed-rental tenants, non-bengkok sharecroppers, and non-bengkok fixed-rental
tenants). Some of our sample tenant households had more than one landlord, some landlords
were not available for survey, and some landlords rented to multiple tenants among our sample
tenant households. As a result, our final dataset contains complete information for 930 landlord
households from 130 study villages (7.15 landlord households per village on average).
Depending on the type of counterpart tenants, we have following groups of landlords:(5) landlords renting to the bengkok sharecropper sample (n=160),(6) landlords renting to the bengkok fixed-rental tenant sample (n=372),(7) landlords renting to the non-bengkok sharecropper sample (n=202), and(8) landlords renting to the non-bengkok fixed-rental tenant sample (n=196).
However, landlords with private farmland can rent out their plots from both bengkok plots andnon-bengkok plots simultaneously. In rural Java, many of village administrators’ households
are also involved in farming. We report further details on the actual land management pattern
for each landlord in Section 5.
The landlord household questionnaire is a shortened version of the tenant household
questionnaire. They were asked the same questions that were included in the tenant householdroster, assets, land ownership and management, and Raven’s progressive matrices. An
additional section on respondent’s position in the village such as management history ofbengkok plots was added to the landlord questionnaire. Since many landlord households rented
out all of their land to tenants, and we were not interested in analyzing agricultural production
strategies from the landlord’s viewpoint, we did not ask about plots rented in from others andcultivated by the landlord households. In the landlord questionnaire, we did not include
questions on cropping pattern/outputs and details of crop production, either. For plots rented
out to tenants, especially under fixed rental contract, it is usually the case that production
management is fully under the control of tenants and landlords do not know its details (Otsuka,2007).
It should be noted, however, that we explicitly asked the landlord about their responsibility
regarding the tenant’s farming for each plot owned by the landlord, including bengkok land
allocated from the village. The section on farm plots included questions on land size, land
quality, location, how to acquire, and details of rental terms and conditions if an owned plot isrented out. The survey design enables us to cross-check the information on a plot under tenancy
from the landlord survey (rented-out plot) and the tenant survey (rented-in plot). We can also
compare contract terms across different plots owned and rented-out by the same landlord. The
resulting dataset contains information on 2,500 plots (2.69 plots per household on average).
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The dataset comprising these 930 households provides detailed information on the bengkok
land institution from the perspective of landlords. Combining the dataset with tenant data, we
can obtain household- and plot-level information for contract pairs. This will give us valuable
insights regarding the institution and its impact on land distribution. Due to technical errors,
we were not able to construct 930 tenant-landlord pairs, but 911 pairs were identified, all ofwhich are different households (one-to-one match).

46