The high level of non-farm activity notwithstanding, agriculture and crop production remain the main sources of income for rural households even though their share has decreased from 83% to 78% or 70% to 66% for agricultural and crop income, respectively. This implies that the level of endowments, as well as the scope for exchanging land endowments through formal and informal means, continue to be of great importance for overall livelihood. In this context, we note that per capita land endowments remain small (0.3 ha of annual and 0.06 ha of perennial crops on average), though somewhat variable across regions. They are largest in the South where the per capita endowment is more than I ha (0.85 ha of annuals and 0,23 ha of perennials) and smallest in the Red River Delta (0.26 ha of annuals and 0.02 ha of perennials). We also note that land was quite equitably distributed, with a Gini coefficient of per capita land endowments ranging between 0.34 to 0.37 except for Southeast & Mekong Delta where the Gini coefficient is 0.51 as compared to 0.26 for per capita expenditure. At the same time, we note that there was no significant increase in land inequality during the period under concern; in fact the Gini coefficient for per capita land endowments is estimated to have declined slightly, from 0.53 to 0.50.

Table I also highlights that there has been a large increase in the share of land held under long-term use rights, a share that increased from 25% in 1993 to 88% in 1998. Given that in all the regions except the South (where 65% of land were held under long-term rights in 1993), the share of land held under long term use rights was one fifth or less of the total, this points towards a considerable admninistrative effort at documenting and increasing the security of land rights.<sup>8</sup> The inter-regional variation in broad levels of development noted earlier is reflected in differences of overall asset endowments, computed as the sum of housing, enterprise, and business assets (agricultural and non-agricultural but excluding land). In line with what is observed in many developing countries, housing constitutes rural households' main asset while enterprise asset make up only between 6% and 13% of the total. Asset endowments are highest in the South. Our data also indicate that access to formal credit remains limited; while the share of producers reporting to have had access to such credit increased from 9% to 21% between 1993 and 1998, being above one third of the total in the South and Central Coast but relatively low in other regions.<sup>9</sup> 3.2 Lamd market partcicpation Descriptive evidence 'on land market participation in both periods as reported in Table 2 points towards a rapid increase in land transactions, together with considerable differences across regions. Rental market participation more than quadrupled from 3.8% in 1993 to 15.8% in 1998. Interestingly, within rental markets, the lion's share of land, almost half in each period, is obtained for free (1.7% in 1993 and 7.2% in 1998), followed by fixed rent (1.7% and 6.2%, respectively) and sharecropping arrangements (0.4%

> a Although the region-wise, about 88 percent of annual land ame entitled with long-tern use, but village-wise, some 20 percent villages (21 out of

> 220) only have less than 60 percent of annual land within village are entitled with long-term land use.

> 9 Note that in the regressions reported below we use the share of households in a given villaSe (excluding the household under concern) who have

> access to credit as the right hand side variable to avoid endogeneity.

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