While 37% of listed properties inside blocks have title, 83% of those without a title inside blocks (and 81% overall) are interested in acquiring a title and 96% (95% overall) are willing to pay ZMK 300 per ha (ZMK 226/ha overall), an amount that would be sufficient to cover the costs of efficient provision. Although acquiring title should be much easier within blocks as no conversion to state land is required, demand and willingness to pay for such documents are, if anything, higher inside blocks than the immediate vicinity. This may suggest binding supply side constraints to accessing title beyond land conversion in line <mark>with studies suggesting that farm blocks often fail to offer higher levels of tenure security or marketability of land, thus not meeting the expectations placed on them (Middelberg</mark> _<mark>et al.</mark>_ <mark>2020).</mark>

# **3.3 Evidence from the farm performance survey**

Table 4 provides descriptive evidence for the total of about 3,000 owned (panel A) and 2,700 owned and operated parcels (panel B) used in the regression analysis. Figures are reported for the entire sample (col. 1) and parcels with title (col. 2), chief certificate (col. 3), without a document (col. 4) and for medium scale (≤ 20 ha) and large (> 20 ha) farms (cols. 5 and 6) separately. Parcels with title are larger than those without (28 ha vs. 12 ha) and that more than two thirds of documents (69% of titles and 74% of chief certificates) are issued exclusively in the name of men with 8% joint and the remainder in the name of women only.

While perceived risk of conflict is, with 2% negligible, levels of perceived transferability are also very low; with 30%, the share of parcels that can be sold is comparable to the average (26%) from a nation-wide household survey (Ali _et al._ 2020), implying that land cultivated by large farms is no more transferable than that by smallholders despite much higher levels of formalization. Only about half of titled land is perceived to be transferable by sale, suggesting that rights supposedly associated with having title may be difficult or impossible to exercise, possibly because traditional authorities continue to exercise oversight over patterns of land use. Such limited transferability can reduce investment incentives and slow structural transformation by constraining productive farmers’ ability to take over land from less productive ones and to access credit which banks may not be willing to provide if lack of an active land sales market (as indeed supported by our data) would increase the cost of foreclosure. Indeed, self-assessed ability to access credit is, with 20% for titled land, only slightly above the level for the entire sample (17%).

Quite surprisingly in light of the high demand and willingness to pay for formal documentation noted above, possession of title also does not seem to be related to either the self-assessed risk of land dispute or the level of soil conservation investment. For the subset of cultivated parcels, levels of crop output or profit per ha are not affected by title status. However, self-assessed land values for titled land are, with ZMK 14,300 per ha well above the sample mean of 10,600 per ha. This could indicate speculative land holding or imply that barriers to acquisition of title generate rents that are capitalized in land prices.

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