Land values and formal property rights: evidence from 22 African countries
Matthew K. Ribar
The majority of African households are employed by the agricultural sector, but the uptake of formal land titles remains slow and uneven. Why do land titles remain so rare, even though they are available on demand throughout much of the continent? This paper introduces a novel measure of rural land values obtained by interacting geospatial data on crop suitability with yearly global commodity prices for 22 dierent agricultural products. These data permit me to measure the total attainable value for agricultural outputs, as well as the increase in potential earnings from fertilizing a parcel and from planting tree crops, at a 10 square kilometer grid cell level for every year from 2001 to 2021. Combining data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Living Standard Measurement Surveys provides region-level titling rates over time for 21 African countries. Previous research on the political economy of property rights has outlined a variety of likely drivers of land titling; I find no evidence of most of them. Households with more valuable landholdings are no more likely to possess a formal land title. Households whose landholdings have higher potential returns to investments are more likely to possess a formal property right, but only in areas without strong customary institutions. By showing that economic variables are insucient to explain formalization, this paper shows how local politics aects whether households demand formal property rights.
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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