Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap

• In Event: The Politics of Land Reforms and Agrarian Change

Abstract

Why do governments that distribute property to their citizens do so without the property rights that could support investment and efficient land markets? Major land reform programs over the last century impacted over one-third of the world's countries but left a legacy of highly incomplete rural property rights. Using original data on land distribution and rural property rights in Latin America from 1930-2008, I demonstrate that less institutionally constrained regimes drive the bulk of the “property rights gap,” particularly when large landowners are excluded from the ruling coalition. Whereas these regimes are motivated and capable of distributing property from large landowners to the landless, they often withhold property rights to build peasant dependencies on the state that can be used to pacify the countryside and create a politically pliable, dispersed support base. More institutionally constrained regimes tend to close the property rights gap through titling – though they are hamstrung when it comes to redistributing property.

Author

• Michael Albertus, University of Chicago