Land titling and rural transition in Vietnam

We examine the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit and mortgage their land-use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform to identify the impact of the law. We find that the additional land rights led to significant increases in the share of the law. We find that the additional land rights led to significant increases in the share of total area devoted to long-term crops and in labor devoted to non-farm activities. These changes appear to be driven by the increased security of tenure provided by the law, rather than by increased access to credit markets or greater land market participation.