Statistical analysis on egalitarian land redistribution in Ethiopia: policy evaluation using repeated cross-sectional data

Abstract Rural livelihood in Ethiopia is dependent on subsistence agriculture that has been challenged by farmland shrinkage as a result of rapid population growth. The Amhara regional state government has implemented egalitarian farmland redistribution in 1997 in the region for small-scale and landless farmers. This study aimed to seek new insights from the perspective of equity, rather than efficiency such as agricultural investment and productivity which other previous studies have focused on, and quantitatively evaluated the effect of the land redistribution on the size of farmland holdings of subsistence farmers. Large-scale repeated cross-sectional national statistics, the Ethiopian Agricultural Sample Survey (AgSS) from 1995 to 1999 were used as the data of this analysis. The difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation was applied to evaluate how the land redistribution affected farmers' farmland holdings. The results showed that farmland holding size per farmer in the Amhara Region has significantly decreased after the land redistribution, therefore, this policy achieved certain results from the egalitarian perspective since national land endowments were redistributed from large-scale farmers to small-scale and landless farmers. However, this study focused on only the short-term effect of the land redistribution and more studies are needed to clarify the long-term effect.