While overall asset endowments have increased, the broad composition of households’ asset portfolio shows greater stability; the house and consumption durables make up the largest share in both periods (61% and 66%, respectively in 1982 and 1999), followed by farm assets including livestock (18% and 22%), and financial and off-farm assets (11% and 21%).

We use information on households’ land ownership and income as reported in the listing exercise to compute the Gini coefficient for self-assessed income for all households in sampled villages. With a Gini coefficient of 0.32 in the first and 0.36 in the second period, inequalities in income have increased between the two periods. It is worth noting that, with a land Gini coefficient of 0.60 in 1982, inequality in assets is higher than income inequality, as also found in other parts of the world. As in the case for income, this measure of inequality increased slightly. Improved access to formal banks at the community level (75% in 1982 to 88% in 1999) will be associated with greater availability of savings instruments as well as credit, thus improving the scope to smooth consumption over time. Coverage with the EGS is available only for 1982 as the same type of program was implemented under different names in 1999.<sup>7</sup>

# **3.2 Incidence and determinants of land transfers**

The share of households that, in 1982-1999, obtained or transferred land through market (i.e. sale and purchase) compared to non-market (i.e. inheritance) mechanisms, is presented in table 2. With 15% and 8% (or 0.88% and 0.47% annually) of the population and 9% and 5% of the land involved in purchasing or selling land, respectively, the level of land sales market activity in the data is in line with what has been reported by other Indian studies (Mani and Gandhi 1994, Dreze _et al._ 1997, Rawal 2001).<sup>8</sup> It is of interest to note significant regional differences, with land purchase markets being quite inactive in the North (6% of population and 3% of land) but relatively active in the South (25% and 18% of population and land). The fact that access to land through non-market channels is, with 10% in terms of households (or 7% in terms of land), less frequent than access through markets, with overlap between the two being minimal. Also, even in the most active areas, land sales and purchase markets are much less active than those for rental in which 15% and 9% participated in 1999 alone (Deininger _et al._ 2007). As attrition was carefully controlled for, and most household splits were actually traced, the fact that the share of those reporting to have purchased land during the period is higher than that of those who sold is most likely due to the fact that sellers sold land in small plots to more than one buyer.

Moving from aggregate to household-level information, table 3 describes initial and final characteristics for the whole sample and by households’ participation in market transactions (i.e., selling,

> 7  Note that, because in our econometric estimation we use only availability of such a scheme in the initial period, this will not affect estimates. 8 Rawal (2001) reports a number of studies from India that find that in most cases the share of land transacted annually was below 0.5%. Part of the reason for this low figure may be the fact that in the studies quoted, the denominator was total village land rather than the land owned by survey respondents.

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