Land Registration, Governance, and Development : Evidence and Implications for Policy

By K. Deininger, G. Feder. 2009

395 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The developmental impact of institutions to establish and maintain secure property rights to land has been a subject of much debate. The authors review the literature on the impact of land administration interventions in specific contexts, highlighting the dependence of outcomes on the governance environment, the effectiveness of the state apparatus, and the distribution of socio-economic power. There is evidence, albeit not uniform, of enhancement of tenure security through land registration with benefits manifesting themselves in higher levels of investment and productivity and a reduced need to defend land rights. Land registration has also been shown to increase activity in land rental markets, leading to higher efficiency overall. Evidence of improved access to credit, due to formalization of land rights, is scant. Even in situations where land registration had positive benefits, the literature contains little rigorous analysis of cost-effectiveness and long-term sustainability of impacts. The authors conclude that formalization of land rights should not be viewed as a panacea and that interventions should be decided only after a careful diagnosis of the policy, social, and governance environment. If intervention is justified, the performance of land administration systems needs to be benchmarked in terms of coverage, cost-effectiveness, and quality of service provision.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88c3af18038f496e450399718363f5b04d38fedd

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Soil Science

In Urban Studies

Citations in the corpus

Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularization in Africa: Pilot Evidence from Rwanda (2011, neutral): “First, with increasing demand for land, many African countries are looking for low-cost options to clarify land tenure, a topic that has been discussed in the literature largely from other regions (Deininger and Feder, 2009).”
Moving off the farm: Land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in China (2012, positive): “…between producers because of availability of other sources of employment or a sufficiently liquid land sales market—are in place, this can facilitate either efficiency-enhancing land transfers to more productive users or use of land as collateral in credit markets (Deininger & Feder, 2009).”
Incentives and the De Soto Effect (2012, background): “Deininger and Feder (2009) provide a detailed review of the empirical literture.”
Women’s Land Rights and Children’s Human Capital in Vietnam (2014, background): “Formalization may be controversial and bring questionable benefits (Deininger and Feder 2009).”