Smallholder Land Access in Post-War Northern Mozambique

SummaryThis paper analyzes the inequality and determinants of flexibility in smallholder land access in post-war northern Mozambique. This paper demonstrates that high land endowments in aggregate do not imply equal access to cultivated or fallow land at the household level, even if land access has some flexibility across time. A formal test establishes the low extent of flexibility in land access at the household level in the study site. The econometric analysis further reveals that some groups of households such as female-headed households and those with low asset endowments or weak social institutions suffer from significant rigidities in land access.