摘要：It is widely believed that land tenure insecurity under a customary tenure system leads to sociallyinefficient resource allocation. This article demonstrates that land tenure insecurity promotes treeplanting, which is inefficient from the private point of view but could be relatively efficient from theviewpoint of the global environment. Regression analysis, based on primary data collected inSumatra, indicates that tenure insecurity in fact leads to early tree planting. It is also found thatcustomary land tenure institutions have been evolving towards greater tenure security responding toincreasing scarcity of land.
