jointly. Even for the sub-sample of participants who participated in recent titling efforts, this number is less than 20% - very small compared to claims that about 80% of titles were issued jointly. One possible explanation for this is that respondents may not have been aware of the exact nature of the documents. A second possibility that is supported to some extent by anecdotal evidence is that even though titles were given to husband and wife jointly but that the wife had actually signed away their part of the title. Part of this low percentage may be due to the constraints imposed by the survey which did not allow for physical inspection of households' documents by the enumerator and identification of which of the two possibilities pertain would be of great interest. Nonetheless, as it is unlikely that a joint title will affect household behavior unless there is awareness of its nature, this finding suggests that, unless they are combined with greater efforts at dissemination and awareness building, issuance of joint titles may have a rather limited impact on actual decisions and thus have limited impact on improving women's position. More detailed research on this issue would be of great interest.

# **Changes in land tenure status and the demand for titling and registration**

At the time the survey was undertaken, the 2475 sample households owned 3659 plots. Information on changes in the legal and tenure status of individual plots, which was obtained from producers' recall, allows to construct the transition matrices presented in table 3. These matrices, for the 1990-1996 and the 1996-1999 periods, illustrate that, during the last decade, the status of ownership has changed for a significant number of plots. To interpret them, note that the percentages do not add up to 100 as households may have plots under different tenure categories and that only plots that were owned in the initial period are included. With regards to the titling program, one notes that a large number of plots received title during the last decade and that the progress of titling programs accelerated markedly during the 1996-99 period.

At the same time, table 3 illustrates that, somewhat surprisingly, government efforts largely concentrated on the award of agrarian reform titles rather than full registration. To demonstrate this, note that the number of plots with agrarian reform title more than doubled in both periods, from 206 to 419 between 1990 and 1996, and from 336 to 690 between 1996 and 1999. By comparison, only 121 and 166 plots, respectively, were registered during the first and the second period. This suggests that registration was either associated high transaction costs, e.g. in the form of complicated pre-requisites and procedures, and distances to registry offices or that the public sector was initially unable to fulfill its mandate of giving fully registered titles.

To ascertain whether these programs were perceived to be associated with any benefits, households who had received title were asked whether they felt to have benefited from this event and, if yes, what the character of these benefits was. The data (not reported separately) indicate that the majority of program 10