Identifying reasons for such insecurity which could include concern about non-extinguished or overlapping historical rights or current competition for land from ‘emergent’ farmers and assessing their productivity impact is a priority for further analytical work.

To explore if access to formal documentation is constrained by supply or demand-side factors, 90% of respondents are without a valid title and were asked if they would like to apply for title and, if yes, what they would be willing to pay for it.<sup>19</sup> Overall, 54% of them -71% in urban and 50% in rural areas- want to acquire title and are willing to pay an average of ZMK 754 (ZMK 968 in urban and ZMK 667 in rural areas) for it. Title demand is highest in Lusaka (83%), followed by North (60%), East (59%), West (28%) and South (27%).

Aggregating demand for title or willingness to pay at the village level provides an estimate of the share of households who would like to acquire title as well as mean or total willingness to pay. These two parameters allow us to identify areas where a titling program would be welcome by a given share of the population and, for a given cost structure, could be run on a cost recovery basis or a given subsidy element. Results in table 3 suggest that, while in 71% of the villages respondents would be willing to pay at least ZMK 100 to get title, this holds for 87% in Lusaka and 81% in the East, but for less than half (45%) in the West and about one-third (35%) in the South. Even in Lusaka District more than 40% of the population do not want title in some 11% of villages, a share is that more than two-thirds (68%) in the West and almost that level (65%) in the South. Use of sampled households’ GPS coordinates allows us to map this. Figure 1 shows the location of villages where more than a given share of the sample population wants to acquire title (panel A) or with willingness to pay above a certain level (panel B). While it is not surprising to find most demand and willingness to pay concentrated along the line of rail, there is considerable variation over space.

# **3.3 Tenure characteristics at the parcel level**

Parcel level data allow to distinguish between residential and agricultural parcels and statutory vs. customary tenure systems as illustrated in table 4. Estimates on population mean using the 3,787 residential parcels in our sample (panel A) suggest that, 43% can be transferred by bequest and 38% by sale, a share that is much higher for parcels located on state (with 65% able to bequeath and 68% to sell) than on customary land (34% and 25% with bequest and sale rights).<sup>20</sup> With rights to 73% of residential parcels documented in some way (41% and 22% with complete or partial title and 11% with a form of informal document), documentation is concentrated on state land; in fact, only 2.2% of residential parcels on customary land have an incomplete title and about 13% have an informal document. Owners want to acquire title for about half (46%) of

> 19 To implement this, a contingent valuation approach was adopted with starting values of ZMK 50, ZMK 500, and ZMK 5,000 and subsequent questions narrowing amounts (e.g., for the ZMK 50 starting value, the sequence is ZMK 3,000, ZMK 100, ZMK 2,500, ZMK 200, ZMK 2,000, ZMK 350, ZMK 1,300, ZMK 500, and ZMK 1,000). Note that at the time of the survey the exchange rate was about ZMK 10 per US$. 20 Exploring the type of transferability restrictions on state land where rights should be fully transferable would be of interest.

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