# **5. Ownership Bundles, Decision-Making, and Permission Structures by Cluster**

The previous section highlighted the importance of transfer rights for profiling landowners. The descriptive statistics in Tables 8-10 show that in all countries, those having transfer rights, either jointly or exclusively, will almost always have roles in decision making, economic ownership, and the right to make improvements. In Tanzania, for example, women in the joint and exclusive right clusters all reported having the right to make investments in/improve the parcel. Those not having transfer rights still enjoy these decision-making and management powers but to a lower extent. In some cases, there are large gaps — in Ethiopia, for example, only 27 percent of non-landowners indicated they had the right to make improvements, even though a high share in this group had economic ownership (79 of men and 62 percent of women) as well as decision-making power (89 percent of men and 82 percent of women). Despite having low levels of documented ownership, most reported landowners do have tenure security in Ethiopia and Tanzania, with higher reported rates of secure tenure among women having mostly exclusive rights.<sup>22</sup> Furthermore, the LSMS+ surveys included unique questions on whether permissions are needed for respondents to exercise each right, revealing some interesting differences across clusters. While landowners having exclusive transfer rights exhibit similar patterns on decision-making roles visà-vis those having joint transfer rights, permission structures look very different across these groups, and more likely to affect landowners in mostly joint clusters. The statistics on needing permission at the bottom of Table 8 through Table 10 are provided just for joint and exclusive clusters in columns (2) and (3), since the number of individuals with rights for the not-hold clusters (column (1)) is small. In some countries, we find that a high share of landowners need permission to exercise rights. In Ethiopia, for example, men and women with mostly joint rights reported always needing permission, as well as 75 percent of men and 84 percent of women in the exclusive cluster. The comparable levels are lower in Malawi and Tanzania. Permission is not necessarily needed to exercise all rights (this applied to about 60 percent of mostly exclusive landowners in Ethiopia, and only around 20 percent in Malawi and Tanzania). Again, the numbers are much higher for the joint clusters. We also find that the increase in the share of respondents not needing permission to exercise any right over land (when moving from those who have mostly joint rights to mostly exclusive rights) is much greater for women as compared to men.

> 22 Data on tenure security for Malawi was not available.  In Ethiopia and Tanzania, respondents were asked “on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is not at all likely and 5 is extremely likely, how likely are you to involuntarily lose ownership or use rights to this parcel in the next 5 years?” Our secure tenure variable takes the value 1 for the response “not at all likely”, and the value 0 for other responses (i.e. some likelihood of losing tenure).

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