speculators (Sitko and Jayne 2014). Similar to earlier periods with high failure rates (Tyler and Dixie 2013), investors may have lacked the technical qualification, financial staying power, and ingenuity to deal with the complexity of agricultural production and associated, narrow margins, variable returns, and susceptibility to exogenous shocks.

This paper aims to show that obtaining quantitative evidence on nature, time profile, crop specificity, and magnitude of spillovers from large farm establishment is possible, illustrate how this can be done with (arguably less than ideal) data from Mozambique, and use the results to draw conclusions for policy, data collection, and future research. Our data are from the 2012 and 2014 rounds of Mozambique’s _Trabalho do Inquérito Agrícola_ (TIA), a survey that includes data from all of the country’s large farms plus a sample of small & medium producers.<sup>3</sup> We assume spatial proximity to be the main channel for spillover transmission, e.g. via learning about new technology or better functioning of local factor markets,<sup>4</sup> and use GPS coordinates for 419 large farms established after 2012 to construct, for every small farm in the sample, a measure of whether at least one new large farm was established and total large farm area cultivated (with specific crops) in concentric circles with 0-25 km, 25-50 km, and 50-100 km around it.

Results point towards external benefits from large farm establishment in terms of small farmers’ adoption of agricultural practices and input access for small farms less than 50 km from newly established large ones. Yet, large farm establishment decreased perceived well-being within a 25 km band and did not facilitate better access to jobs or output markets, cultivation of larger areas or, once other factors are controlled for, increased yields. While this allows us to reject the notion of generalized negative spillover effects from large farm establishment, it does not justify large unconditional subsidies to attract investors.

In interpreting these results, one has to bear in mind that data limitations allow us to only estimate average effects accruing in the relatively short-term. Longer-term effects and the way they vary with modalities of land acquisition, the nature of the investment, investor attributes, and other conditions are likely of high policy interest. We discuss low-cost ways to generate such estimates through additions to already planned surveys and links to readily available administrative data and lay out how this could feed into an evidencedriven analytical agenda that would, by increasing transparency and the scope for accountability and proper management, benefit investors, local communities, and public institutions.

The paper is structured as follows: Section two describes Mozambique’s agricultural sector, the challenge of supporting smallholder productivity growth for broad-based poverty reduction, and the potential role of spillovers from large land-based investment. Section three presents data to describe performance of small

> 3 Throughout this paper, we use ‘small’ to refer to small and medium scale producers.

> 4 We assume external effects regarding adoption of cultural practices and use of fertilizer, pesticides, or seeds, will emanate from any large farm while only large farms growing the crop in question will help increase yields.

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