Influences on the strength of property rights
Grover, Richard & Christine Grover
Pioneering work by de Soto has demonstrated the importance of secure property rights for economic development. This has led to a number of projects supported by the World Bank and donor agencies in emerging, transitional and developing economies designed to create secure property rights through titling and land registration. There is, however, still considerable uncertainty about the conditions needed for improvement in security of tenure. In particular there is a question as to whether tenure security interventions can be effective if pursued in isolation from other policy initiatives, for example, aimed at changing the business environment or the ethos of public service. This paper takes four measures of the security of property rights produced by the Heritage Foundation, the World Economic Forum, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and USAID and examines the factors which are associated with greater security. It focuses on the countries included in the USAID study and those in the Bertelsmann Transformation Index in order to exclude the richer countries which generally have a relatively high level of security of property rights as it is considered that their presence in a sample could have a distorting effect. The paper includes a critique of the sources of property rights data. It examines the extent to which secure property rights are associated with factors such as the strength of the legal system, corruption and the efficiency of government, the quality of the governance of a country, the quality of corporate governance, the degree of development of the business environment, the quality of education, healthcare and infrastructure, the strength of the financial system, gender equality, and environmental stress.
Event: FIG Working Week 2012 : Territory, environment, and cultural heritage
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