Person:
Deininger, Klaus

Agricultural and Rural Development Unit, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Agriculture and Food Security

Departments

Agricultural and Rural Development Unit, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Last updated January 31, 2023

Biography

Klaus Deininger is a Lead Economist in in the Agriculture and Rural Development Team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. His areas of research focus on income and asset inequality and its relationship to poverty reduction and growth; access to land, land markets and land reform and their impact on household welfare and agricultural productivity; land tenure and its impact on investment, including environmental sustainability; and capacity building (including the use of quantitative and qualitative methods) for policy analysis and evaluation, mainly in the Africa, Central America, and East Asia Regions. He is a German national with a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota, an MA in Agricultural Economics from the University of Berlin, and an MA in theology from the University of Bonn.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 119

Does Sharecropping Affect Productivity and Long-Term Investment? Evidence from West Bengal’s Tenancy Reforms

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12) Deininger, Klaus ; Jin, Songqing ; Yadav, Vandana

Although transfer of agricultural land ownership through land reform had positive impacts on productivity, investment, and political empowerment in many cases, institutional arrangements in West Bengal -- which made tenancy heritable and imposed a prohibition on subleasing -- imply that early land reform benefits may not be sustained and gains from this policy remain well below potential. Data from a listing of 96,000 households in 200 villages, complemented by a detailed survey of 1,800 owner-cum tenants, point toward binding policy constraints and large contemporaneous inefficiency of share tenancy that is exacerbated by strong disincentives to investment. A conservative estimate puts the efficiency losses from such arrangements in any period at 25 percent.
Does Greater Accountability Improve the Quality of Delivery of Public Services? Evidence from Uganda

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04) Deininger, Klaus ; Mpuga, Paul

While the importance of corruption as a possible impediment to foreign investment in an international context is now well realized, it is not clear to what extent corruption affects, either directly through bribe-taking or indirectly through inadequate quality of public services, the level of economic activity by domestic entrepreneurs. Using a large survey from Uganda, the authors show that domestic and foreign entrepreneurs, government officials, and households are unanimous in highlighting the pervasiveness and importance of corruption. Efforts to establish institutions to deal with corrupt practices have not been matched by public education on the proper procedures. The fact that such lack of knowledge on procedures to report corruption increases households' risk of being subject to bribery and significantly reduces the quality of public service delivery leads the authors to conclude that improved accountability will be important to reduce the incidence of corruption and improve delivery of public services.
Economic and Welfare Effects of the Abolition of Health User Fees: Evidence from Uganda

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04-01) Deininger, Klaus ; Mpuga, Paul

The authors use household level data for Uganda for 1999-2000 and 2002-03, before and after the abolition of user fees for public health services, to explore the effect of this policy on different groups' ability to access health services and morbidity outcomes. They find that the policy change improved access and reduced the probability of sickness in a way that was particularly beneficial to the poor. Although the challenge of maintaining service quality remains, aggregate benefits are estimated to be significantly larger than the estimated shortfalls from the abolition of user fees.
Incidence and Impact of Land Conflict in Uganda

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-03) Deininger, Klaus ; Castagnini, Raffaella

While there is a large, though inconclusive, literature on the impact of land titles in Africa, little attention has been devoted to the study of land conflict, despite evidence on increasing incidence of such conflicts. The authors use data from Uganda to explore who is affected by land conflicts, whether recent legal changes have helped to reduce their incidence, and to assess their impact on productivity. Results indicate that female-headed households and widows are particularly affected and that the passage of the 1998 Land Act has failed to reduce the number of pending land conflicts. The authors also find evidence of a significant and quantitatively large productivity-reducing impact of land conflicts. This suggests that, especially in Africa, attention to land-related conflicts and exploration of ways to prevent and speedily resolve them would be an important area for policy as well as research.
Welfare and Poverty Impacts of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme : Evidence from Andhra Pradesh

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-07) Deininger, Klaus ; Liu, Yanyan

This paper uses a three-round 4,000-household panel from Andhra Pradesh together with administrative data to explore short and medium-term poverty and welfare effects of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Triple difference estimates suggest that participants significantly increase consumption (protein and energy intake) in the short run and accumulate more nonfinancial assets in the medium term. Direct benefits exceed program-related transfers and are most pronounced for scheduled castes and tribes and households supplying casual labor. Asset creation via program-induced land improvements is consistent with a medium-term increase in assets by nonparticipants and increases in wage income in excess of program cost.
Are Mega-Farms the Future of Global Agriculture? Exploring the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship for Large Commercial Farms in Ukraine

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2013-07) Deininger, Klaus ; Nizalov, Denys ; Singh, Sudhir K.

With farms cultivating tens or hundreds of thousands of hectares, Ukraine is often used to demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in modern grain production. Panel data analysis for all the country's farms with more than 200 hectares in 2001-2011 suggests that higher yields and profits are due to unobserved factors at rayon (district) and farm level rather than economies of scale. Productivity growth was driven not by farm expansion but by exit of unproductive and entry of more efficient farms. Higher initial shares of area under farms with more than 3,000 or 5,000 hectares at the rayon level significantly reduce subsequent exit, suggesting that land concentration reduces productivity growth. The paper draws implications for global evolution of farm structures.
Comparing Land Reform and Land Markets in Colombia : Impacts on Equity and Efficiency

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-04) Deininger, Klaus ; Castagnini, Raffaella ; González, Maria A.

Based on a large survey to compare the effectiveness of land markets and land reform in Colombia, the authors find that rental and sales markets were more effective in transferring land to poor but productive producers than was administrative land reform. The fact that land transactions were all of a short-term nature and that little land was transferred from very large to small land owners or the landless suggests that there may be scope for policies both to improve the functioning of land markets and to facilitate greater land access by the most disadvantaged. Analysis of the factors associated with success in a sample of land transfers from large to small producers helps to identify key elements for policies in both respects.
Investment and Income Effects of Land Regularization : The Case of Nicaragua

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-01) Deininger, Klaus ; Chamorro, Juan Sebastian

The authors use data from Nicaragua to examine the impact of the award of registered and nonregistered title on land values and on investments attached to land. They find that receipt of registered title increases land values by 30 percent and greatly increases the propensity to invest, bringing investment closer to the optimum. Consistent with descriptive statistics indicating great demand for regularization of land rights, especially from the poor, this finding suggests that titling can have a positive distributional effect. Of overriding importance, however, are the legal validity and official recognition of the titles issued.
Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction

(Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003) Deininger, Klaus

Land policies are of fundamental importance to sustainable growth, good governance, and the well-being of, and the economic opportunities open to, both rural and urban dwellers - particularly the poor. To this end, research on land policy, and analysis of interventions related to the subject, have long been of interest to the Bank's Research Department, and other academic, and civil society institutions. The report aims to strengthen the effectiveness of land policy in support of development, and poverty reduction, by setting out the results of recent research in a way that is accessible to a wide audience of policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, academics in the Bank's client countries, donor agency officials, and the broader development community. Its main message rests on three principles: 1) provision of secure tenure to land improves the welfare of the poor, particularly by enhancing the asset base of those whose land rights are often neglected, and, creates incentives needed for investment, paramount to sustainable economic growth; 2) facilitation of land exchange, and distribution, whether as an asset or for current services, at low cost, through markets, and non-market channels, will expedite land access by productive, but land-poor producers, so that once economic growth improves, financial markets would rely on the use of land as collateral; and, 3) governments' contribution to the promotion of socially desirable land allocation, and utilization. The report discusses mechanisms to promote tenure security, demonstrates the importance of rental market transactions, arguing the removal of impediments to these can generate equity advantages, and positive investments. It also illustrates mechanisms, ranging from taxation, to regulation and land use planning to address these issues.
Is There a Farm-Size Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture? Evidence from Rwanda

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02) Ali, Daniel Ayalew ; Deininger, Klaus

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in Rwanda, where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector. Nationwide plot-level data from Rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications. The inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used, but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village-level market wage rates. These findings imply that, in Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.