Do all benefit equally from the implementation of agricultural land policy reforms? Vietnam is progressing towards the development of a real estate market where long-term land use privileges can be mortgaged, sold, traded and inherited. Since 1987 and 1988, Vietnam’s agricultural collectives have been dismantled and many rural inhabitants have been granted long-term land use rights over individual and family farm plots. However, not all households have been granted long-term use rights to the land they use for agricultural purposes. Some land is contracted or leased by the State or State-owned enterprises and some households may not have clear use rights at all. This paper examines the situation of long-term land use rights allocation in 1998 at the household level in Vietnam to explore the geographical and socio-economic factors that determine the probability that a household has long-term use rights to its agricultural land. Using household-level survey data from the 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Survey, this study finds that location and household ties to the land and community play a role in determining whether a household has long-term use rights. The study finds weaker evidence that other socio-economic
factors directly determine the likelihood of having long-term use rights. These variations in implementing private property rights stem from the dependence of the central government on local actors for implementation. This can be seen as a principal-agent dilemma for the central authorities, which seek to implement strict standards of property ownership across the country. These findings show that tenure security, although requisite for ensuring that property rights play
a role in economic development, may be very difficult to ensure on a nation-wide basis.