records, and the farm performance survey. Section four presents the results from regressions exploring the impacts of title on self-assessed land rights, land values, investment, and productivity. Section five concludes by discussing implications for policy and future research.

# **2. Background and conceptual framework**

A large literature shows LSLBI can provide benefits for local populations if their land rights are respected while also highlighting that policies and the institutional arrangements to implement them affect volume and impact of such investment and that geo-referenced inventories are needed to assess quantity and impact of such investment. Low levels of agricultural productivity and large amounts of potentially suitable land have long led Zambia to adopt policies, including a dualistic land tenure regime, to encourage large farm growth. While this is estimated to have led to an agriculture sector dominated by (domestic) large farms, neither the extent and nature of large farms nor the effect of such policies on their productivity is known.

# **2.1 Lessons from large land-based investment**

While early contributions highlighted the scope for “pioneer investors” to support discovery of agroecological suitability and establishment of technology and market linkages (Collier & Venables 2012), the extent to which large land acquisition by capital intensive large farms can support Africa’s structural transformation has long been subject to debate (Deininger & Byerlee 2011; Collier & Dercon 2014; Cotula 2014).<sup>8</sup> A key motivation for providing title to large farms is the hope that doing so will provide them with the means to access credit to complement their better access to product markets and management thereby catalyzing structural transformation. However, with few exceptions (Muyanga & Jayne 2019), evidence on large farms’ productivity or its determinants is lacking, making research on this issue a priority.

Several studies explore long-term effects of foreign cash crop plantations using discontinuity designs. They often find negative and persistent effects on human capital as in South America (Dell 2010) or Puerto Rico (Bobonis & Morrow 2014) due to labor coercion. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, individuals located inside the perimeter of a historical rubber concession exhibit significantly worse outcomes in terms of education, wealth, and health whereas their village chiefs are elected less competitively and provide fewer public goods (Lowes & Montero 2020). Positive impacts of a large banana plantation in Costa Rica on a range of welfare indicators highlight the importance of labor mobility; in the case studied, labor was highly mobile and had ample alternative sources of employment so it could be retained by the monopsonist only by offering amenities (Mendez-Chacon & van Patten 2021).

> 8 Most of the land available for expansion in Africa is concentrated in a few countries (Deininger & Byerlee 2012), with poor access to infrastructure, low levels of profitability (Jayne _et al._ 2014b), and often weak governance (Arezki _et al._ 2015) that are outweighed by the advantages of resource access (Lay & Nolte 2018) and institutional proximity (Raimondi & Scoppola 2018).

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