Effects of Land Administration: Evaluation of Ecuador's Rural Land Administration Program, SigTierras

This paper evaluates the impact of a rural land administration program in Ecuador, SigTierras. Using a doubly robust estimation, which combines a difference-in-differences design with inverse propensity weighting, we estimate the causal effect of the program on beneficiary households with land tenure issues. We find that SigTierras had no effect on improving the perception of land tenure security, reducing land conflicts, or increasing the use of land inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers. SigTierras did significantly increase agricultural wages and annual household income of beneficiary landowners. These results suggest that land administration programs must incorporate specific mechanisms to ensure parcels can effectively be regularized and lower the burden and private cost of required legal formalization procedures. It is further crucial to understand the sociocultural context in which such policies are implemented. Where informal tenure provides sufficient tenure security, providing lower cost solutions, such as digital cadaster maps of the parcel, may be sufficient to incentivize landowners to complement farm production with off farm income generating activities.