disseminating its content. Doing so suggests that the Land Act has a potential to increase households’ net wealth by 14 percentage points, i.e. about US$ 340 per household or US$ 1.15 billion for all owners or occupiers of land in rural Uganda.<sup>7</sup> The fact that, due to low levels of awareness,<sup>8</sup> the lion’s share of these benefits has not yet been realized, illustrates the potentially very large from more aggressive dissemination of its contents. As there are few landless in Uganda and the distribution of land is more equal than the overall asset distribution, the associated increase in asset values would be pro-poor in the sense that the relative gain would be bigger for the bottom than the top quartiles of the non-land asset distribution. The presence of a significant demand for certificates of customary ownership or full freehold title evidenced by our survey points towards ample opportunities to strengthen the pro-poor impact of this by establishing a program that would respond to this demand but establish higher charges for titles than for basic customary certificates. This implies not only that, even by conservative estimates, changes in land legislation may be a worthwhile investment but also that Uganda and possibly other countries in the region as well can reap significant benefits from more determined efforts to disseminate new land laws.

# **5. Conclusion**

By providing an in-depth analysis of the economic impact of Uganda’s 1998 Land Act, this paper adds to the methodological as well as policy debate. On the methodological side, our findings suggest that one reason for the divergent conclusions on the impact of land title found in earlier literature may be a failure to account for the multi-dimensional nature and complexity of land rights. We find a clear difference between rights to transfer land, which increase the propensity to undertake visible investments and thus can be expected to affect land values in case of a sale, and more traditional measures of tenure security, which in addition increase the tendency to manage soil fertility in a sustainable manner. Similarly, households’ awareness of their land rights in a number of dimensions has a significant and large impact on outcome variables that is in many respects equal to the impact of the land rights variables considered in the earlier literature, suggesting that failure to account for this variable may result in biased estimates.

Although a large number of African countries have recently embarked on revisions of their land legislation that aim to increase the level of tenure security enjoyed by customary land owners and women, we know of no study aiming to assess the economic impact, both actual and potential, of such steps. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, use of an objective measure of households’ knowledge of these provisions can be used to approximate the “value” of the legal changes. Results point towards a large

> 7 The 2002 Census of Population and Housing puts the number of rural households at 4.4 million but does not report the share of those who operate agricultural holdings. As we did not have access to disaggregated Census data, we use the 1999 Uganda National Household Survey which indicates that 77% of rural households own or occupy agricultural land. Absence of data for land, including agricultural land that is rented out, owned by urban dwellers, constrains our ability to make inferences beyond rural land that is either owned or occupied, thus providing a conservative estimate of the potential benefits from the land Act.

> 8 As half of our sample comprises of areas where at least some dissemination activities have been undertaken, the level of knowledge about the Land Act in the overall population is likely to be significantly below the figures that were obtained in this sample.

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