# **3.1 Descriptive evidence for lease and sale transactions**

Descriptive information for the close to 900,000 transactions for which new leases were signed and prices reported after January 2021 are presented in table 2, overall (column 1) and for commercial and personal land in the entire sample (columns 2 and 3), for the roughly 60% of the sample where tenant data is available (columns 4 and 5), and for the 9% of the sample for which accessing registry data was feasible (column 6). Parcels for commercial land are slightly larger (2.3 ha) than those for personal land (1.6 ha). Mean and median annual lease rates are US$ 117.5 and 89.6 per ha, respectively. The average number of lease transactions per village over the entire period was close to 170 (192 and 69 for commercial and personal land, respectively), implying that new leases were recorded in about 10,889 villages in Ukraine Of nearly 340,000 leases conducted in 2021 only, about half were concluded before or after the moratorium on land sales was lifted for individuals. Although the fact that the date of land market opening was known well in advance makes increases of land rents in anticipation of land sales markets likely, implying our estimate is a lower bound, this allows us to use an indicator variable for lifting of the sales moratorium to obtain an estimate of the short-term effects of this policy change on lease prices. While the number of leases conducted in 2024 remains, with some 125,000, much smaller, a similar strategy can be applied to assess the impact of land sales market opening to legal entities on the lease price paid by such entities.

While more than 70% of leases are for terms of less than 14 years, which provides the most flexibility given the current legal environment of a minimum lease term of 7 years, about 17% and 11% are concluded for terms between 14 and 20 or above 20-years, respectively. The average leased parcel is 2.1, 7.0, 12.1, and 27 km from the next primary, secondary, tertiary road or motorway, respectively and 9.9 and 12.9 km from the next railway station and grain elevator (appendix table 3). Remotely sensed data suggest that about 77% of the area of leased parcel is cultivated, 20% and 2% are covered with grass or trees, respectively, and there are small shares of built up and other land uses (appendix table 3).

Linking cadastral records to field boundaries from remotely sensed imagery as discussed above points to an average field size of 63 ha (68 ha for commercial and 49 ha for personal land) with about 6% of field area not mapped in the cadaster. Tenant information, which is available for 60% (534,127/884,936) of lease transactions with reported prices, points to a mean size of 345 and 261 hectares of registered land for tenants of commercial and personal land, respectively with these tenants having registered rights to between 20% and 24% of cultivated land in the villages where transactions were recorded.<sup>17</sup> Tenants who had rights to less than one third, between one third and half, and more than half of village land were involved in 62%, 14%, and 18% as well as 63%, 13%, and 13% of new lease contracts for commercial and personal land,

> 17 Note that 6.6% of transactions for commercial and 7.7% for personal land were concluded by tenants who did not previously have registered use rights to land in the village.

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