# **3.1 Data and descriptive statistics**

Our data are from two nationally-representative surveys in Malawi, namely the Fourth Integrated Household Survey 2016/17 (IHS4), a cross-sectional survey of 12,480 households, and the Integrated Household Panel Survey 2016 (IHPS), a longitudinal survey of 2,508 households that had been followed since 2010.<sup>7</sup> The IHS4 asked the most knowledgeable household member to provide information on household members’ ownership of and rights to agricultural parcels and other assets.<sup>8</sup> On the other hand, the IHPS aimed to conduct private interviews with each adult household member on his/her personal ownership of and rights to the residential and each agricultural parcel, based on a common roster of parcels that is used across all private interviews in each household. In contrast to the IHS4, the IHPS questions on land rights for a parcel were asked only if the respondent identified him or herself as a (co)-owner.<sup>9</sup> The mean values for key variables at the household- and parcel-level from the analysis sample of parcels that were reported to be owned are provided in Table 1 for the IHPS (column 1) and the IHS4, split into the total sample (column 2) and the sample of respondents claiming to be owner or co-owner of the parcel in question (column 3). The average household has about 5 members, with a 44-year old head. Eighty percent of heads of households are Christian; approximately 30 percent are female; 70 percent can read and write Chichewa; and have an average of 5.5 years of education. The mean area for agricultural parcels is 0.4 hectare and the incidence of organic fertilizer application and cash crop cultivation is 23 percent and 6 percent, respectively. The residential parcels are smaller and dwellings on them have been occupied for an average of 7 years. Thirty-nine percent of household residential dwellings have improved roofs, walls, or floors.<sup>10</sup> As only 2.3 percent (in IHPS) or 1.6 percent (in IHS4) of households report to have formal documentation to agricultural land, or 6.5 percent or 3.5 percent, respectively, to residential land, we focus on individual (co)-owners’ rights at the parcel level irrespective of whether or not formal documents exist.<sup>11</sup> Information on rights for agricultural parcels in Table 2 highlights several interesting observations. First, at the household-level, (co)-owners often can only exercise a subset of the rights generally associated with full ownership and the incidence of short-term rights is higher than that of long-term ones. The IHPS data

> 7 Data, questionnaires and basic information documents for the IHS4 2016/17 and the IHPS 2016 can be accessed <u>here and here. Both surveys were</u> implemented with technical and financial assistance from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) using the Surveys Solutions Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) platform. Implementation of individual interviews as part of the IHPS 2016 received technical and financial support from the World Bank LSMS Plus <u>(LSMS+) initiative, aiming to improve the</u> availability and quality of individual-disaggregated survey data on asset ownership, work and employment and entrepreneurship in IDA countries. 8 A parcel (referred to as ‘garden’ in Malawi) is a contiguous piece of land under a specific type of tenure that can comprise multiple plots, defined by the types of crop grown.

> 9 The basic information document for the survey (https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/2939/download/47216) and Kilic et al. (2020) give more information on survey organization and implementation modalities for individual data collection under the IHPS. 10 We define improved walls to be made of burnt bricks and/or concrete (59% of sample), improved roofs to be made of iron sheets, clay tiles, and/or concrete (18% of sample), and improved floors to be made of smooth cement, wood, and/or tiles (41% of sample) and compute an ‘improvement index’ by adding dummies for each of the indicators and dividing by 3.

> 11 Evidence on formal rights suggests that, for agricultural land, individuals with formal rights are more likely to have the right to bequeath and sell, an outcome driven by men’s rights as there is no significant difference for women. Similarly, men with formal documents are more likely to have bequest and sale rights but there is no difference in the aggregate.

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