Before 2022, Ukraine’s agriculture sector contributed about 10% of gross domestic product and 42% of the country’s exports, making the country an important supplier of agricultural commodities, in particular sunflower oil, maize, and wheat to the global market. This importance raised concern that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would not only impair Ukraine’s economic welfare (Devadoss and Ridley 2024) but also food security among importers heavily dependent on Ukrainian supplies and globally (Lin _et al._ 2023). The formal initiation of EU accession negotiations in December 2023 also implies that Ukraine’s agricultural structure and market functioning is of importance for potential future expansion of the EU.

To justify our empirical approach, a better understanding of Ukraine’s land policy environment is key with three aspects particularly relevant: First, the types of land that could be owned and the ownership structure were shaped by de-collectivization in the early 2000s when some 7 million individuals, most of them workers on former collective farms, became landowners by being issued shares to land parcels of 3-4 ha each. In this process, a distinction was made between land for personal use that is close to the village settlement area and often comprises home gardens and land for commercial use that is made up of the land cultivated by former collective or state farms. While the former was often used for subsistence production and may eventually be informally converted to non-agricultural uses,<sup>3</sup> the latter has fewer alternative land uses beyond agriculture. Given these structural differences, we distinguish between these two types (which we refer to as ‘commercial’ and ‘personal’ land for simplicity) throughout.

Second, the way in which land rights were mapped, registered, and can be transacted, resulted in different types of informality. Although cultivated fields generally comprise several cadastral parcels, the land corresponding to individual owners’ shares was, after privatization in the early 2000s, mapped by donorfunded projects. These projects had varying levels of quality control, implying that parcels may have been left out of the cadaster by mistake or because they had a dispute pending at the time of cadastral mapping.

Figure 1, taken from Martyn _et al._ (2022), illustrates this for an irrigated area in the country’s South: each of the circles corresponds to a field, the boundaries of which are defined by the reach of the associated center-pivot irrigation system. Simple visual inspection shows that fields comprise many cadastral parcels and that there are cultivated areas that are not mapped in the cadaster, a situation we refer to as informality of type I. In 2013, a new digital registry of rights was created but documentation on rights that had been created before was not transferred. Even for parcels that are mapped in the cadaster, rights may thus not be visible in the registry either because owners did not register them or did so before 2013 so that registration information is still contained in the old (analogue) database in the cadaster. Consulting registry data allows to identify this type of informality, which we refer to as informality of

> 3 A small part of land for personal use includes non-transferable use rights to ‘reserve land’ that had not been cultivated before that village councils could give to individuals.

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