抄録
This paper examines the efficiency and welfare impacts of landholdings in rural Vietnam, including a consideration of regional differences between the North and South Vietnam. We use panel data from field surveys that were carried out from 1997 to 2007 in Ninh Binh province, which is located in the Red River Delta, and An Giang province, which is located in the Mekong Delta.
We found that there are salient differences in terms of landholdings between the surveyed areas. The land distribution is more equitable and farm size has been declining over time more sin the North. In addition, in the North, the change of landholdings is driven by non-market factors such as inheritance and expropriation by the government. On the other hand, high inequality in landholdings and rising landlessness that is accelerated through market transactions are outstanding features in the South. The land distribution also seems to be polarized, with a limited amount of middle size class of land ownership.
Next, we carried out a micro-econometric analysis to clarify whether the agricultural land in the surveyed areas are allocated efficiently or not. Estimation results show that the land distribution is mainly concentrated around a group of farmers that have achieved the highest land productivity. Thus the distribution of landholdings in both surveyed areas can be interpreted to be efficient, although the agrarian structures are quite different between the two surveyed areas.
Finally, we investigated the welfare impacts of these landholdings on sample households. In the North, since the change of landholdings have been affected less by the structure of agricultural production than by social or cultural factors like inheritance and governmental expropriation, the downsizing of farm size is inevitable. The small land endowment is contributing to a decline in agricultural income and also is leading to a diversification to non-agricultural income sources, even when farmers can realize high land productivity. This implies that an efficient land allocation doesn’t necessarily mean that agricultural activity will have a crucial role as a livelihood strategy in the North.
Conversely, in the South, our results show that middle-class households who mainly accomplish high productivity and are gradually accumulating land through the land market earn more agricultural income than other farm size classes. Households who sell their land, however, might consist of two types. One types supplies their land voluntarily to be engaged in non-agricultural activities, while the other is forced to sell land to cope with the exogenous shocks on household income. Therefore, the rise of marginal and/or landless farmers produced by market transactions appears to have a mixed implication for welfare impacts in the South.
