Deininger, Klaus

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: May 29, 2025

Biography

Klaus Deininger is a Lead Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the 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.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 129

Yield Gains from Balancing Fertilizer Use: Evidence from Eastern India
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Arteaga, Julian; Deininger, Klaus
As with most agricultural inputs, the optimal use of fertilizer leverages the production complementarities between different types of nutrients. Wide variation in the intensity of nutrient application rates suggests there are potentially large productivity gains to be had from rebalancing fertilizer use across nutrient types even under a fixed expenditure budget. Using detailed information on a large sample of rice fields across three states in eastern India, this paper investigates whether a more balanced use of fertilizer—measured as the ratio of potash to nitrogen applied to a field—can lead to higher yields and revenues. To address the endogeneity of fertilizer application decisions, the analysis exploits the fact that nitrogen-based fertilizers demanded by Indian farmers are mostly produced domestically in a limited number of manufacturing plants, while all potash-based fertilizers must be imported by ship from abroad. Instrumenting for the ratio of potassium-to-nitrogen fertilizer applied on a field with the relative travel distances between farmers’ villages and both the nearest urea production plant and the nearest international port, the paper estimates the impact of more balanced fertilizer use on yields and revenues. The estimates show that at median levels of fertilizer use, and keeping the level of expenditure on fertilizers constant, rebalancing fertilizer application choices such that the potassium-to-nitrogen ratio of fertilizer is doubled would lead to a 4.8 percent increase in yield.
Capitalizing on Digital Transformation to Enhance the Effectiveness of Property Institutions: Conceptual Background and Evidence from 85 Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-14) Deininger, Klaus; Hilhorst, Thea; Zevenbergen, Jaap; Nkurunziza, Emmanuel
Property registries have long been a pillar of state capacity and a basis for private market activity. While registry establishment and operation traditionally were costly and time consuming, digital technology makes low-cost registry operation and wide outreach easier. To guide developing countries aiming to establish such registries and measure progress, this paper develops indicators (in terms of digital coverage, interoperability, and property taxation for local service delivery and public land management) of effective digital registry service provision. Data from 85 countries highlight vast differences and provide suggestions for strategic reforms as well as a basis for measuring progress over time. Expanding geographical coverage and collecting these indicators on a regular basis could provide guidance to improve the way in which, by protecting property, the state creates the basis for widely shared prosperity and a livable environment.
Land Policies for Resilient and Equitable Growth in Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-22) Deininger, Klaus; Goyal, Aparajita
Land institutions and policies will be critical to help African countries respond to the challenges of climate change, urban expansion, structural transformation, and gender equality. Together, they affect urban dwellers’ ability to access productive jobs, live in decent housing, and breathe clean air; farmers’ and women entrepreneurs’ capacity to insure against shocks, increase productivity, and diversify income sources; and governments’ ability to plan, tax property to provide services, and manage public land in a way that provides sustained local benefits by attracting investment, including via climate finance. "Land Policies for Resilient and Equitable Growth in Africa" draws on a wealth of data, examples, and studies from Africa and beyond to show that regulatory and institutional reforms can harness this potential by improving quality, coverage, usefulness, and sustainability of documented land rights. By identifying viable reforms with transformative potential that fully harness digital opportunities, this book provides practical guidance to governments seeking to enhance their land institutions’ performance; to their partners supporting such reform; and to policymakers, land professionals, scholars, and civil society aiming to lay the foundations for Africa to better utilize its economic, human, and ecological potential. "This volume provides an essential reference, based on an impressive review of the literature on land issues in Africa and an exhaustive account of policies and policy experiments aimed to promote the efficient use of this key resource for the development of the continent." — François Bourguignon, Professor Emeritus, Paris School of Economics "Many African governments will find this report highly useful. It is full of little-known successes and practical ways by which they can improve their land policies by harnessing new technologies. Africa’s urban population will rapidly triple: clarifying land rights is an urgent priority in building the successful cities of the future. By 2050, if the inherited policies of the past were retained, today’s youth would be struggling in unliveable mega-slums." — Sir Paul Collier, Professor of Economics & Public Policy, Oxford University "This is an excellent study that combines insights from years of research with practical insights for policy and action on the ground." — Jyotsna Puri, Associate Vice President, Strategy and Knowledge, International Fund for Agricultural Development "Land institutions affect the effective use of land but also the functioning of credit, labor, and product markets. Nowhere are these issues more relevant than in Africa, and this report is important and timely." — Johan Swinnen, Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute "This report illustrates how legal and institutional reforms that capitalize on digital opportunities can strengthen land institutions and policies to optimize land use, enhance people’s rights, narrow gender disparities, and catalyze structural transformation in a manner that aligns with the continent’s distinctive context and serve as a pivotal instrument for social and economic advancement." — Maximo Torero, Chief Economist, Food and Agriculture Organization
Land Policies and Institutions for Equitable and Resilient Growth in Africa
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2025-01-24) Deininger, Klaus; Goyal, Aparajita
In coming decades, Africa's urban populations will expand, and the effects of climate change be more keenly felt. Land policies and institutions will be key for urban dwellers to be able access productive jobs, breathe clean air, and live in decent housing; for entrepreneurs, especially women, to leverage land for productive investment; and for farmers to diversify, insure against shocks, and accumulate capital. Yet, many African land registries perform poorly, command little trust, and have failed to capitalize on opportunities to improve quality, relevance, and outreach via digital interoperability, use of earth observation, and connectivity. Literature highlights scope for regulatory and institutional reforms to (a) expand property taxation and land value capture and to improve urban service delivery, planning, and land use regulations; (b) increase quality and affordability of land services and access to land price and ownership data; (c) guide issuance of rural land use rights to reduce barriers to rural factor markets, including by spatially enabling farmer registries to improve subsidy targeting and effectiveness; and (d) demarcation and transparent decentralized management of public land to attract investment, including in climate finance, without fueling corruption, and to manage disputes before they escalate into ethnic violence.
Reforming Land Valuation and Taxation in Ukraine: A Path towards greater Sustainability Fairness, and Transparency
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-13) Deininger, Klaus; Ali, Daniel Ayalew; Bukin, Eduard; Martyn, Andrii
The shift from administrative to market-based property valuation is critical for effective decentralization and local revenue collection in Ukraine. To demonstrate the viability of such a shift, this paper uses prices for nearly 200,000 agricultural land sale transactions in 2021–24 together with parcel attributes from public data to estimate a hedonic model and predict prices for all of Ukraine’s 7.5 million commercial agricultural land parcels. Despite the war, mean predicted prices are significantly above current ‘normative monetary’ valuations (NMVs). Inter-regional differences are pronounced. Steps to extend mass appraisal to residential urban properties and legislative changes needed to replace NMVs with a market-based approach are discussed, noting that a shift to market-based valuation will have far-reaching implications for the volume of public and private investment that can be attracted to support reconstruction; the likely effectiveness of such investment; and local governments’ ability to benefit from any land value appreciation that may result from it.
Land Price Effects of Informality, Farm Size, and Land Reform: Evidence from More Than One Million Transactions in Ukraine
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-02) Deininger, Klaus; Ali, Daniel Ayalew
This paper uses a rich set of geo-coded administrative and remotely sensed data on more than 1 million agricultural land transactions in Ukraine to explore how informality, size, and recent land reforms affect land prices. Three main findings are highlighted. First, absence of registered rights generates large negative externalities, the size of which plausibly exceeds the cost of registering all land. By contrast, informality of lease contracts is a choice that may enable owners to evade regulatory obstacles that prevent them from renegotiating contracts to obtain more favorable terms. Second, while land market liberalization generated significant indirect benefits, gains are unevenly distributed. Furthermore, competition in sales markets remains limited, pointing to scope for measures—including reducing the transaction costs of selling land and accessing mortgage finance, improving publicity of pending land sales, and use of electronic auctions—to enhance the reforms’ impact on efficiency and equity. Third, size at the parcel, field, and farm levels is associated with higher per hectare prices, pointing to scope for market-based land consolidation and growth of medium-size farms to increase land values and productivity. Achieving this potential will require measures to limit speculative land acquisition and exercise of market power by making local land markets more competitive and using market-based land valuation as a basis for taxing land on a recurrent basis and any capital gains due to land appreciation.
Did Program Support for the Poorest Areas Work?: Evidence from Rural Viet Nam
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-10) Dang, Hai-Anh H.; Deininger, Klaus; Nguyen, Cuong Vjet
This paper investigates the impact of a large-scale poverty alleviation program targeted at the 62 poorest districts in Viet Nam. The analysis of multiple data sets spanning the past 20 years uses a regression discontinuity design with district fixed effects. The findings do not reveal significant program effects on household welfare (as measured by per capita income and poverty) or local economic development (as measured by nighttime light intensity and establishment of new firms). However, the findings show that the program facilitates a shift from farm to nonfarm employment and significantly increases the share of nonfarm income for rural households. A possible explanation for the positive effects on nonfarm employment is the improved access to credit that the program provides to participating households. The findings also show that the program increases household access to electricity, public transfers, educational subsidies for students residing in the program districts, and health care utilization, possibly through improving the availability of commune health care centers.
Outward and Upward Construction: A 3D Analysis of the Global Building Stock
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-16) Esch, Thomas; Deininger, Klaus; Jedwab, Remi; Palacios-Lopez, Daniela
The developing world has built structures on an unprecedented scale to accommodate population growth and urbanization. The horizontal and vertical structuring of the building stock resulting from this “megatrend construction” strongly influences urban and rural poverty, sustainability, resilience, and quality of life. However, due to data constraints, little is known about how and why 3D building patterns vary globally and in the developing world in particular. This study uncovers novel facts on global 3D building patterns as a result of outward and upward preferences in construction and investigates their relationship to the development process. To this end, new high-resolution data on the area, height, and volume of the global building stock are combined with various analyses undertaken at different spatial domains. The results show that building stock per capita increases convexly with income, but income only explains two-thirds of the differences in international volume. Additionally, while building upward systematically drives international volume differences, low-rise buildings still dominate construction patterns. Urbanization tends to reduce space consumption per capita as urban residents consume less volume than rural residents. Finally, the analyses of construction preferences may help to assess construction needs by forecasting volume requirements in developing Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Using Satellite Imagery and a Farmer Registry to Assess Agricultural Support in Conflict Settings: The Case of the Producer Support Grant Program in Ukraine
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-20) Deininger, Klaus; Ali, Daniel Ayalew
While cash transfers have emerged as an attractive option to minimize negative long-term impacts of conflict, the scope for targeting and assessing their impact in such settings is often challenging. This paper shows how a digital farmer registry in Ukraine (the State Agrarian Register) helped to target and evaluate such a program, using the country’s $50 million Producer Support Grant in a way that largely avoided mis-targeting. The analysis applies a difference-in-differences design with panel data from 2019–23 on crop cover at the parcel/farm level for the universe of eligible farmers registered in the State Agrarian Register. The findings suggest that the program significantly increased area cultivated, although the effect size remained modest. Impacts were most pronounced near the frontline and for the smallest farmers. The paper discusses the implications in terms of a more diversified menu of support options and the scope of using the State Agrarian Register to help to implement these options, as well as lessons beyond Ukraine.
Impact of the Russian Invasion on Ukrainian Farmers’ Productivity, Rural Welfare, and Food Security
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-06-23) Deininger, Klaus; Fang, Ming
Data from 2,251 small and medium-size farms for 2021 and 2022 show that area reductions in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine remained limited. However, worsening terms of trade reduced farm profitability, implying that 46 percent of farms had a negative cash flow and 54 percent (67 percent in the 50-120 hectare group) were credit constrained in 2022, implying that longer term effects may be more adverse. Total factor productivity varies significantly across size groups but is not significantly different between formal and informal farms in the same size group. This suggests that limited transferability of land use rights that are disproportionately used by smaller farms may be one reason for low productivity. Improving transferability of land, digital access to markets, and mortgage lending could thus trigger investment and growth in higher value products by small and medium-size farms to solidify Ukraine’s comparative advantage in agriculture and improve rural living conditions in the context of reconstruction.