WUNRN
http://www.trust.org/item/20140130093745-h2au7
Vietnamese
Households Prosper More When Women Hold Land Title – Study
Vietnam Woman by Rice Paddy Field in Yen Phy Village, 12.5
Miles South of Hanoi. Photo-Reuters/Kham
Direct Link to Full 44-Page 2014 Study Document:
“Land Reform and Welfare in Vietnam: Why Gender
of the Land-Rights Holder Matters”,
http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/news/upload/Rodgers-Paper-1-29-14.pdf
By Stella Dawson Moore
WASHINGTON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When
women hold land title in rural Vietnam, their households are more prosperous,
poverty is less and capital investment levels higher than in households where a
man holds sole title, new research has found.
While family economic security improves under
private land titling regardless of gender, the benefits are more marked when a
woman’s name is on the document than only a man’s, researchers at Rutgers and
Brandeis University found.
The findings are among the first to provide
strong evidence of the economic benefits of women having documented legal
rights to use of land.
The researchers compared household living
standards data in Vietnam from 2004 to 2008 with gender on land use documents.
They found that household poverty was 6 percent lower, capital expenditure
levels 10 percent higher and women’s self employment 6 percent higher when a
woman had land-use rights in her own name. Jointly held title also showed
improved household economic security over a man holding land title alone.
“The results do provide evidence that when
women have their names on the land title, there are beneficial effects for
themselves and for their children,” Yana Rodgers, an economist who participated
in the research, told a land seminar at the World Bank.
The health of their children also improves, she
said. Child illness fell, health insurance coverage rose, school enrolment
increased and the amount of household income used for alcohol and tobacco as
opposed to food declined when women held the land-use rights, compared with
male-only or jointly-held rights, according to the research.
SHIFT IN VIETNAM LAND OWNERSHIP
Gender and land ownership is hotly debated in
the development community. According to some estimates,
women own less than 15 percent of land worldwide, even though they make up
roughly 80 percent of the agricultural workers. But the paucity of data makes
it tough to analyse the impact of gender and land ownership on poverty rates.
A large amount of land in developing countries
remains undocumented, and when land is titled, the household ownership often is
not broken down by gender. Markus Goldstein, a development economist at the
World Bank, called Rodgers and her colleagues’ findings “important” in a field
where there is little concrete evidence.
But he questioned the mechanisms that might be
driving the improvements in household security. For example, there was little
to show that land title had strengthened women in Vietnam tapping bank credit
for investment purposes.
Vietnam began moving from agricultural
cooperatives to private land ownership in the late 1980s, passing a law in 1993
that gave households the power to exchange, lease and mortgage their land-use rights.
This spurred one of the largest ever land titling programmes in developing
countries, and within seven years, 11 million land-use titles were issued to
rural households.
At the same time, women increased their
participation in agriculture, which currently supplies jobs for 58 percent of
the female labour force in Vietnam, compared with 51 percent of the male work
force. These two factors made Vietnam fertile ground to study whether
gender in land rights matter for different household outcomes.
Interviews with women in the Mekong Delta who
were included in the research confirmed their findings. Women with land were
more likely to hold jobs outside the home, and 68 percent said that land rights
made them feel more economically secure. Two-thirds also said they felt they
had more power over economic decisions such as sale or purchase of agricultural
products when their name was on the deed.
The preliminary paper,
“Land Reform and Welfare in Vietnam: Why Gender of the Land-Rights Holder
Matters”, was researched by Yana Rodgers and Alexis Kennedy at Rutgers
University and Nidhiya Menon at Brandeis University.
Memon and Rodgers’ findings on child welfare, conducted with
Huong Nguyen, were published in the World Development journal last year.
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