unlikely to adjust the area of land in response to changes in tax rates. We therefore assume that landholders bear the full burden and behavioral responses are not expected.

The tax incidence of the rural land use fee and agricultural income tax is measured at two different levels. First, we calculate tax incidence as the household payments of land use fee and agricultural income tax as a proportion of annual nominal total household expenditure.<sup>14</sup> Second, we impute individual taxes by assigning household tax payments to the individual in proportion to the individual’s share of household land.<sup>15</sup> Individual tax incidence is derived by dividing the individual’s imputed tax payments by per capita expenditure.

Our empirical approach has the following limitations. First, the analysis is a first-order approximation of tax incidence and does not consider behavioral responses—although, as noted, area-based land taxes are unlikely to cause such responses. Second, although we assume that the self-reported tax payments recorded in the survey are accurate, there could in fact be a recall or reporting error on the part of respondents. For this reason, we conduct a sensitivity analysis by estimating the tax incidence using tax liabilities estimated from land area and the regional tax schedules in section 4.4b. Lastly, we examine self-reported individual landholdings and the associated tax burdens, but our analysis does not investigate intra-household gender relations.

# **4. Results**

# **4.1 Household and Individual Characteristics**

Table 3 shows demographic and other characteristics of all rural households by household type. (See Appendix 4 for characteristics of individual male and female respondents and Appendix 5 for household characteristics disaggregated by household head marital status.) Statistically significant differences (p<0.05) are reflected in bold (1) between male- and female-headed households, and (2) between female-only and dual-adult households. Female-only households are a subset of the female-headed households: just over half of female-headed households (57 percent) have no male adult present. An adult son lives in 30 percent of female-headed households. Far more female respondents in general are married (71 percent) than female household heads (28 percent).

Because of the gender norms limiting women’s roles in agricultural work, a higher share of female-only and single female-headed households (21 percent) sharecrop or rent out land than dual-adult households (11 percent) and married female-headed households (9 percent). Female-only and single female-headed households are also more vulnerable economically; of those who sharecrop out land, separate estimates show that they receive only 43–48 percent of agricultural yield, with female-only households at the lower end of this distribution, and their annual household expenditure is lower than that of their male counterparts. Also, only 17 percent of single female-headed households receive financial support from friends or family, compared to 24 percent of married female-headed households (see Appendix 5).

Table 3 also shows that female-only and female-headed crop-farming households are less likely to receive extension services than male-headed households. These differences in household composition are important

> 14 For tax incidence studies using a similar method, see for indirect tax incidence (which ranks households by per capita expenditure or income and calculates incidence by using total household expenditure or income in the denominator) Grown and Valodia (2010) for Argentina, Ghana, India, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Uganda, and the United Kingdom; Cronin et al. (2012) for the United States; and Anyaegbu (2010) for the United Kingdom.

> 15 We calculate the proportion of land held by the respondent by (1) dividing the area of the parcel by the number of coholders (as reported by the respondent); (2) summing up the total area of land held by the individual across all parcels to obtain total area of the individual’s landholdings; and (3) dividing the individual’s land area by the household’s total land size. There is extensive literature on the “sharing rule”—how individuals within the households share resources (Browning et al. 1994; Browning and Chiappori 1998). Although there are gender biases in land allocation, because the 2000 Revised Family Code gives spouses equal rights during the marriage and equal division of assets in divorce (Kumar and Quisumbing 2015), we rely on the respondents’ self-reported landholding status to identify landholders, and for jointly held plots, we assume that the landholders have equal shares.

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