Benefits and costs of land reform in Zimbabwe with implications for Southern Africa

Empirical evidence from a set of land reform beneficiaries suggests that Zimbabwe’s land reform was successful: the internal rate of return to the land reform project is high, settlers accumulated substantial amounts of assets, and they increased their agricultural productivity substantially over time. This evidence contradicts the general notion that land reform was a failure, a notion supported by welfare indicators showing poverty to be as high amongst land reform beneficiaries as it is amongst communal farmers. In this paper, we employ a unique data set comprising information on a group of land reform beneficiaries and a control group of communal farmers to re-examine, using the propensity score matching technique, the existing evidence on the success of land reform.