Certified migrate : property rights and migration in rural Mexico
Gonzalez-Navarro, Marco et al.
Improving the security of tenure over agricultural land has been the focus of a number of large land certification/titling programs. While the main justification for these efforts is to increase productive investments and facilitate land transactions, we show that if access rights were tied to actual land use in the previous regime, a frequent condition, these programs can also lead to increased outmigration from agrarian communities. We analyze the Mexican ejido land certification program which, from 1993 to 2006, awarded ownership certificates to 3.6 million farmers on about half the countryys agricultural land. Using the program rollout over time and space as an identification strategy, we show that households obtaining land certificates were subsequently 30% more likely to have a migrant member. The effect was larger for households with ex-ante weaker property rights and with larger off-farm opportunities. At the village level, certificates led to a 4% reduction in population. We show evidence of certificates leading to sorting, with larger farmers more likely to stay and land-poor farmers more likely to leave in high productivity areas. We test -and reject- the possibility that the migration response was due to a relaxation of liquidity constraints. Finally, use of satellite imagery shows that improved property rights did not lead to reductions in cultivated acreage. The policy lesson from the paper is that strengthening property rights and making land markets work better can have important spillover effects on the spatial allocation of labor.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2013
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