the survey’s measure of family labor, i.e. if males, females, or children household members participated in certain types of activities is extremely imprecise, it made a positive contribution to output.<sup>23</sup> Each added sick member over the last three months is estimated to have reduced output by 4 points. Participation in exchange work, presumably to break seasonal bottlenecks, is estimated to have increased production by 8 points and the coefficient on extension is positive but insignificant.

One advantage of (2) is that it allows us to combine direct and indirect impacts to assess if and to what extent inheritance regimes affects productivity.<sup>24</sup> To obtain such estimates, we add (in col. 3 and 6), an indicator variable for whether or not a household practiced crop rotation, the one investment that, based on our earlier results is significantly affected by inheritance regimes (see table 7). Results provide no basis for the conjecture of matrilineal systems being associated with lower levels of productivity, irrespective of the inclusion of a crop rotation dummy. For patrilineal regimes, a significant negative effect emerges for specifications that do not control for crop rotation but disappears if gender or the respective indicator are included, suggesting that even in patrilineal systems, failure to practice crop rotation rather than the inheritance regime per se, is associated with lower levels of productivity.

# **5. Conclusion and policy implications**

Data from Malawi allow us to assess the extent to which large farms (estates) established sporadically and in isolation from the customary sector in the late 1980s helped to establish a dynamic commercial farm sector. We find that in most cases, estates’ productive performance is inferior to that of smallholders while in the smallholder sector, fear of land loss is high and associated with significant productivity losses for female cultivators, and, contrary to earlier literature, the inheritance regime is not a major impediment to smallholder investment or productivity. The estimated present value of fear-induced productivity losses is estimated to exceed the amount of resources required to implement a low-cost systematic tenure regularization program along the lines of Rwanda.

Two implications for policy stand out. First, even in the customary regime, piloting of approaches to secure tenure especially for women, accompanied by careful real-time evaluation, could thus help inform next steps to feed into regulation for Land Bill implementation. Second, where land had been transferred to estates historically, this would need to be preceded by use of digitized administrative data -including on boundaries or (expired) lease documents- to adjudicate rights in a way that, where needed, would reconcile legal rights with current occupancy status. Major steps for doing so would include (i) revision of lease fees to bring them more in line with productive potential; and (ii) establishment of a systematic process to

> 23 Estimated coefficients on male members’ input are slightly above that for women and children or hired workers 24 Such analysis will be valid if inheritance regimes are exogenously given and do not change over time. 13