implications, noting that from an economic perspective, intervention programs are warranted only if the impacts of tenure insecurity are larger than the cost of implementing a program to reduce tenure insecurity.<sup>10</sup>

# **3. Data and descriptive evidence**

Descriptive data highlight three results. First, tenure insecurity is high with 22% of cultivators concerned about land loss and 15% having experienced land disputes in the last decade. Second, village data highlight increased land scarcity and transactions. Finally, comparing the productivity of estates with that of smallholders points towards marked differences in terms of intensity and efficiency of land use, including a pronounced negative relationship between farm size and productivity over the entire farm-size spectrum.

# **3.1 Sampling and characterization of smallholder farmers**

Our data are from the 2006/07 NACAL implemented by Malawi’s National Statistical Office (NSO) with the Ministry of Agriculture. Beyond household-, individual-, and village-level data collection instruments administered to a sample of smallholders, the survey also includes estates. While estates were drawn from a nation-wide list,<sup>11</sup> smallholder farms to be sampled were selected in two stages: In a first stage, enumeration areas (EAs) were randomly selected by district with stratification by agro- ecological zone and a listing conducted in those that had been selected. In the second stage, farm households in each of the selected EAs were randomly drawn with a target of 10 small (< 2 acres) and 5 medium sized (≥ 2 acres) farms each.<sup>12</sup> For a sample of 931 estates and 23,896 smallholder farmers, the survey collected information on household composition, welfare, food security, assets (incl. livestock), marketing, and parcel-level data on land tenure and investment, in the 12-month period starting October 2006. Data gaps reduced the sample for our analysis to 17,672 smallholders and 868 estates with complete information. Also, to reduce error from misreporting due to intra-household informational asymmetries that are widespread in developing countries (Goldstein and Udry 2008; Udry 1996) including Malawi (Lovo 2016; Telalagic 2012), we restrict the regression sample for estimating impacts of insecure tenure to parcels operated by the respondent, which reduced the sample to 15,472 smallholders.<sup>13</sup> The data point towards widespread tenure insecurity: 22% and 21% of respondents voice concern that their land may be taken away or encroached upon. In the past decade, 15% of respondent households experienced a land dispute (table 1). While there is no information disputes nature or start date to link to the case study

> 10 Implementation costs can be reduced through participatory approaches based on general boundaries as in Rwanda with costs of US$5 per parcel (Ali _et al._ 2016a; Ali _et al._ 2014a) or even more via group approaches as in Mozambique (Kaarhus and Dondeyne 2015). 11 Availability of a complete list of estates is a key advantage of this study over earlier ones where inability to compile the needed information made sampling very difficult (Abeyasekera 1997).

> 12 In EAs with less than 5 small farms, small farms were added to bring the total sample to 15.

> 13 Coefficients of interest for the entire sample have the same sign but are less precisely estimated, consistent with the notion that information on parcels that are not operated by the respondent contains considerable measurement error.

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