Policy Research Working Paper                  10389




 Land Institutions to Address New Challenges
                   in Africa
        Implications for the World Bank’s Land Policy

                             Klaus Deininger
                             Aparajita Goyal




Africa Region
Development Research Group
March 2023
Policy Research Working Paper 10389


  Abstract
 Although land and associated property is a key part of                             that private parties and reduce associated enforcement costs,
 national wealth and protecting rights to is a key function                         and provide local and global public goods. Institutions
 of the state, Africa’s formal land institutions often still oper-                  such as the World Bank can create momentum for reform
 ate on regulations that barely changed since colonial times,                       through globally comparable monitoring and help harness
 undermining public trust and leading to high levels of                             these opportunities by focusing interventions on providing
 informality that make it difficult to underpin vibrant urban                       analytical support to establish the policy and institutional
 land and financial markets and control corruption, remove                          environment to (i) document and enforce rights at scale;
 impediments to structural transformation posed by rural                            (ii) regulate land markets to ensure competition and deliver
 factor market imperfections to empower women, improve                              public goods including price information, land use plan-
 equity, and ensure sustainable management of public land.                          ning to coordinate investment and avoid externalities, and
 If an appropriate regulatory framework is in place, digital                        tax land value gains to support local public services; and
 technology provides opportunities for African countries                            (iii) reduce the transaction cost for private parties to enter
 to broaden the range of rights that can be legally recog-                          and enforce contracts involving immovable property and
 nized, expand the type of contracts involving such rights                          the uses to which it is put.




 This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region and the Development Research Group,
 Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and
 make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also
 posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at kdeininger@worldbank.org and
 agoyal3@worldbank.org.




         The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development
         issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the
         names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those
         of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and
         its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.


                                                       Produced by the Research Support Team
                               Land Institutions to Address New Challenges in Africa:

                                     Implications for the World Bank’s Land Policy




                                                          Klaus Deininger
                                                          Aparajita Goyal




JEL codes: R3, O18, O44, Q15, Q30




This paper draws on the Flagship Report on Land Governance prepared by the Office of the Chief Economist in the Africa Region. We thank
Andrew Dabalen and Albert Zeufack for guidance and insightful discussions Daniel Ali, Rajul Awasthi, Richard Baldwin, Katherine Baldwin,
Karol Bordeaux, Frank Byamugisha, Mark Cackler, Jonathan Conning, Issa Faye, Riel Franzsen, Rene Giovarelli, Ed Glaeser, Douglas Gollin,
Vernon Henderson, Thea Hilhorst, Matthew Hunter, Heather Huntington, Remi Jedwab, Sandra Joireman, Adnan Khan, Jonathan Lindsay, Jennifer
Lisher, Vivian Liu, William McCluskey, Joao Montalvao, Jorge Munoz, Janvier Mwisha, Njuguna Ndung’u, Rita Nikiema, Emmanuel Nkurunziza,
Ed Parsons, James Robinson, Bekele Shiferaw, Iain Shuker, and Victoria Stanley for inputs and helpful discussions.
                            Land Institutions to Address New Challenges in Africa:
                               Implications for the World Bank’s Land Policy




1. Motivation and background

How land rights are assigned, documented, and can be exchanged will affect individuals’ wealth, gender
equity, incentives for investment and resource conservation, and productivity of land use. By providing
price signals and facilitating the operation of land markets for land, credit, and insurance, formal registries
underpin key aspects of economic activity. The information maintained by them also provides a basis for
generating own source revenue to invest in public goods, including infrastructure, even in settings where
the tax base is narrow, by levying recurrent land taxes based on market values or capital gains taxes;
regulating land use to reduce the scope for negative externalities across space or time; and managing public
land in line with societal objectives.

Land rights are important for Africa’s urbanization, structural transformation, and resilience to climate
change. Historically, high cost of service delivery, reinforced by discriminatory legislation, often with
colonial roots, limited access to documented land rights in many African countries. Equity was undermined
as it was more difficult for women and other secondary right holders to enforce and exercise their rights.
Agricultural productivity, adaptation capacity, and resilience suffered as output increased by expanding
into marginal, risky, and often environmentally sensitive areas rather than investment in capital and better
factor market functioning, with shocks often triggering conflict. Urban job creation, mobility, and service
access diminished as informality limited investment in floorspace, collection of property tax revenue for
local service provision, and financial market development. State capacity, trust in the state, and the ability
to access climate finance were often undermined by ambiguous definition and non-transparent ways of
transferring rights to public land. Yet, while these challenges have been widely recognized, the cost of
establishing and operating land institutions often made reform difficult.

This paper argues that digital technology can reduce the cost of and increase the benefit from documenting
land rights in several ways. Shifting towards digital records, workflows, and interoperability can reduce the
cost of documenting and registering rights, increase the quality of such information and the ability to access
it, and allow routine dissemination of data (e.g., on prices) to provide a benchmark to improve market
outcomes. Free satellite imagery allows to consistently observe land use in near real time at a very granular
level, thus improving the ability to target and enforce land use restrictions, certify supply chains, and enter
contracts contingent on land use information, e.g., in terms of conservation outcomes. Connectivity can
expand competitiveness of land markets, e.g., through electronic auctions, increase the scope for developing


                                                       2
reputation or links to other markets (e.g., those for insurance) to improve land use, and makes protection
and exercise of secondary rights (or group rights management) easier as it allows electronic gathering of
consent to and near-costless transfer of resources directly to right holders without a need for intermediaries.
Harnessing these opportunities requires adjustments in the regulatory framework and will have to be
tailored to local contexts. However, some general principles emerge for land in urban areas, used for
agriculture, and public land.

Opportunities for urban job creation, activation of land and financial markets, and generation of public
revenue from taxing land appreciation are enormous. They can be realized by improving coverage, quality,
and interoperability of property registries as well as land service delivery by digitizing, simplifying, and re-
engineering workflows; (ii) reducing cost of registration and passing on associated savings to customers;
and (iii) replacing prohibitive transaction taxes (stamp duties) with a recurrent land tax; and (iv) increasing
transparency and trust by making data on land valuation for tax purposes and transaction prices publicly
available and reducing bureaucracy through interoperability with other systems (including banks’ ability to
register and cancel mortgages).

To harness human capital externalities from closer density, land institutions can help by ensuring that (i)
land titles and affordable registration fees allow (women) entrepreneurs to use land as collateral to create
jobs and developers to access long-term finance to build high structures in support of dense urban
development; (ii) public land is managed transparently to provide infrastructure and public services and
rights to such land are allocated through transparent auctions rather than through backroom deals by
politically connected organizers that can create multiple challenges; (iii) building standards and planning
rules contribute to public safety and avoidance of externalities and are enforced impartially; and (iv)
information on land valuations and transaction prices is public to allow use of fiscal instruments to generate
own source revenue from recurrent property taxes or taxes on land-related capital gains to encourage
productive land use and set a benchmark for land values for infrastructure investment.

To replace agricultural area expansion with intensification and climate-smart adaptation as the main source
of output increase, better functioning of rural factor markets to foster structural transformation is essential.
The contribution of land to structural transformation can be enhanced by (i) increasing women’s voice and
contributing to structural transformation by securing their rights to land in case of inheritance or divorce
via changes in (family) law and regulations to allow their low-cost documentation; (ii) improving insurance,
land, and labor market outcomes by removing regulatory barriers to certain types of land transfers; (iii)
operationalizing laws allowing low-cost documentation of communally and individually held rural land use
rights by local authorities while ensuring data integrity and interoperability through connection with a
central database; (iv) encouraging long-term land transfers-including across generations-as a basis for


                                                       3
investment and long-term contracts; and (v) supporting decentralization by defining local bodies’ role in
managing land use and benefit from higher land productivity through increased tax revenue rather than
wasteful forum shopping or land speculation.

The importance of documenting private rights must not detract from the fact that, in both urban and rural
areas, large amounts of land remain in public ownership or even encourage non-transparent appropriation
of public land by the powerful private interests to be legitimized with outside support, especially as the
value of such lands increases with better access infrastructure and increased demand for environmental
services. Land institutions can contribute to resilience and sustainability by registering and publicizing
boundaries of public land; vesting ownership of public land with local authorities that meet key criteria of
internal accountability, transparency, and public oversight.

Improving governance of public and customary land is particularly important as Africa’s economies are
likely to be exposed to more frequent and severe climate shocks and secular declines of agricultural
potential. Land institutions can help enhance resilience and reduce conflict by (i) ensuring that secondary
land rights, particularly those held by pastoralists, migrants and women, are documented and can be
enforced, transferred; and used as basis for insurance against extreme events or negotiation if adaptation
investment is considered; (ii) registering and publicizing boundaries of public land and devolving
ownership of public land to the local level, subject to accountability and oversight, and use resource
management agreements, permits, and fiscal mechanisms to align incentives with access to local
information for monitoring; (iii) ensuring competitive transfer of (use) rights to public land via (electronic)
auction and providing the infrastructure to conduct these; (iv) publicizing any contracts involving use of
public land to support independent third party monitoring; and (v) creating preconditions for supply chain
certification and climate finance by establishing mechanisms for bona fide third parties access parcel
boundaries for individuals or groups they are contracting with to independently verify land use.

Institutions such as the World Bank can support African countries’ efforts to improve land institutions in
two ways: First, land policies everywhere are intertwined with power and political economy issues that may
lead interest groups benefiting from the status quo to oppose or try and undo reforms that improve overall
welfare and transparency. Independent monitoring of the quality and cost of land service provision in a
globally comparable way is thus important to motivate and create momentum for reforms; document
progress in implementing them; and alert outside investors of opportunities and institutional risks associated
with land-related investments in specific countries.

Second, the importance of the regulatory environment and the location-specific nature of land institutions
implies that analytical support to help countries translate general principles into strategies to adapt local
laws and regulations to support institutional reform and set measurable targets can provide significant value

                                                       4
added. Three types of targets are particularly relevant. First, the amount of land and associated real estate
to which rights to private and public land are documented (making full use of the spectrum of options
available to do so) and can be linked to actual patterns of land use in close to real time. Second, the cost for
private parties to enter into agreements regarding such rights (whether registered or not) and enforce them.
Finally, the extent to which land institutions serve the public good via regulation to ensure competitiveness
and markets including measures (such as provision of granular price information) to reduce information
cost and entry barriers; transparent planning of land use to reduce externalities and harmonize private
investment with public infrastructure provision; and taxing land and gains in its value in a way that supports
decentralization and local public service provision.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses customary and modern land institutions
in Africa, perceptions of their performance and examples of reforms that improved performance at scale.
Sections 3 and 4 discuss how better documented land rights (for private or public land and at individual or
group level) can help to address broader challenges in rural and urban areas. Recognizing that sequencing
of reforms in ways that focus on specific areas where success can be demonstrated quickly and expanding
from there may often help initiate and sustain policy change, section 5 discusses specific entry points for
land reform and how these can be supported by institutions such as the World Bank.

2. Characteristics of African land institutions

A defining characteristic of African land institutions relates to the role of customary authorities in managing
land. This section discusses origins, advantages and challenges faced by these and compares them to
documented ones, highlighting that lack of clarity on the interface between formal and traditional
institutions can undermine trust as well as tenure security and lead to wealth bias, a notion that is supported
by survey data. We then discuss how new technology can address these issues if corresponding regulatory
and institutional adjustments are made and draw on evidence from documented reforms.

2.1 Traditional institutions

In rural Africa, especially at low levels of population density, customary institutions under traditional chiefs
have long administered land rights locally in an equitable, accessible, and cost-effective way. In such
systems, chiefs allocate arable land to individuals or families under secure long-term rights and
manage use of common land such as pasture and forest for joint benefit, following rules that evolved and
were adapted to local conditions over long periods. Lineage members have an innate right to land to
ensure equity and provide a social safety net (Baland & Francois 2005). The ability to adjust exploitation
of common use areas to variation in resource availability is particularly important in high-risk settings




                                                       5
where efforts to replace customary with individualized formal arrangements often proved unsustainable as
they were more costly and less flexible (Nugent & Sanchez 1998).

Customary tenure also prevails in African settings where land is used individually and even in many urban
settings. Local presence, access to private information (Basurto et al. 2020), and informal channels of
accountability (Baldwin 2018) often allow chiefs to administer land in ways that are less costly (Boone
2017) and more flexible and responsive to local needs than formal institutions. Chiefs’ ability to resolve
local land disputes quickly, fairly, and without bribes (Winters & Conroy-Krutz 2021); to motivate
contributions to public goods (Tourek et al. 2020); and to assess individuals’ land demand (Manara & Regan
2021) has been documented in the literature.

Individual rights under customary tenure are generally strong enough to incentivize agricultural investment
(Besley 1995) including fallowing (Goldstein & Udry 2008), tree planting (Fenske 2011), and use of
organic manure (Gavian & Fafchamps 1996) to improve soil fertility (Lawin & Tamini 2019). While some
types of investment, especially by outsiders (Djezou 2016; Bros et al. 2019), may partly be motivated by a
desire to stake visible land claims (Brasselle et al. 2002), many investments, e.g., organic manure, leave no
visible traces, implying that concerns about reverse causality will not apply and trees or other forms of
border demarcation often also enhance productivity (Deininger & Jin 2006).

The rights granted under customary tenure also allow owners to engage in local land rental transactions to
allow some coping with idiosyncratic shocks (Beck et al. 2019), enabling efficient but land-poor farmers
to expand (Deininger et al. 2017). Studies from Uganda (Baland et al. 2003), Kenya (Jin & Jayne 2013),
Ethiopia (Teklu & Lemi 2004; Deininger & Jin 2006), Zambia and Malawi (Chamberlin & Ricker-Gilbert
2016) document the productivity benefits from land rental. Welfare effects are normally positive as rents
received by owners exceed what they could earn from self-cultivation (Deininger et al. 2011) with women
often benefiting disproportionately (Wineman & Liverpool-Tasie 2017).

A key characteristic of customary tenure is that permanent land transactions (i.e., long-term leases or sales)
with outsiders are not allowed. This is unlikely to be a binding constraint if demand for land by outsiders
is limited or contracts remain short term only. Historically, if long-term individual land transactions with
outsiders offered advantages such as access to technology, markets, or other factors of production (Fenske
2014); land became more scarce; or external demand for land increased (Guirkinger & Platteau 2014),
customary systems often individualized in a gradual manner. Such transitions were more rapid if other
means to smooth consumption or manage externalities became available (Delpierre et al. 2019).

Recognition of the advantages of traditional authorities (Bruce & Migot-Adholla 1994) in terms of cost,
local trust, and adaptive capacity to manage land rights and resolve associated disputes (Platteau 2000),


                                                      6
triggered a wave of laws to formally recognize customary systems all over Africa in the early 2000s (Alden
Wily 2018). The importance of customary institutions is also recognized by the “Framework and Guidelines
for Land Policy” (F&G) adopted by African Heads of State in 2010 and national land policy documents
elaborated building on this framework.1 In many cases, however, legal provisions make little difference on
the ground (Bubb 2013), due to lack of subsidiary legislation and enforcement. Without such legal clarity,
even well-intended or technically justified interventions to strengthen customary land management may
worsen landowners’ position as they are reported to have done in Ghana (Adam et al. 2021) or Zambia
(Green & Norberg 2018) where efforts to register customary rights without a legal basis, ways to hold
customary authorities to account, or transfer rights, had no economic impact (Huntington & Shenoy 2021).

To make recognition of customary tenure relevant in practice, there is need for regulations on how such
rights are to be documented and enforced (Firmin-Sellers 1995). This requires clarifying, among others,
determining (i) the boundary and interaction between local authorities and central registries to ensure
complementarity with each other rather than compete, including ways for chiefs to benefit from measures
that increase land values and economic activity in their territory; (ii) how to commit to long-term contracts
with outsiders that may transcend individual chiefs’ tenure; (iii) what information to draw on and standards
to follow when planning land use; (iv) what avenues of appeal subjects of traditional leaders have access
to; and (v) how to establish fora and mechanisms to resolve inter-community disputes.

Strong complementarities between traditional authorities and the state in basic service delivery (Henn 2022)
suggest that defining the role of customary authorities vis a vis formal ones especially at local level could
harness significant synergies. Failure to clarify this relationship, on the other hand, may trigger competition
between traditional and formal systems that increases uncertainty and encourages wasteful spending of
resources on ‘forum shopping’, i.e. pursuit of claims to property in formal and customary systems in parallel
(Eck 2014). Competition between formal and traditional systems may encourage chiefs to start charging
for services they previously provided for free (Honig 2021) and, in extreme cases, leave resorting to
physical violence as the only way to settle competing claims (Greiner 2017).

Efforts at regulating the role of traditional authorities in land administration and management need to be
cognizant of three issues. First, as their main allegiance is to the lineage, chiefs may be challenged to resolve
inter-community disputes or to commit to long-term contracts with outsiders. For example, in West Africa,
chiefs invited outsiders when labor was sparse but started discriminating against them as land became more
scarce (Bambio & Bouayad Agha 2018), lowering productivity (Fenske 2010) and increasing insecurity
and conflict risk (Linkow 2016). Pastoralists’ rights to seasonal migration routes, wetlands, or watering


1
 The F&G was spearheaded by the Africa Land Policy Initiative that brings together the African Union Commission, the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa (UN-ECA), and the African Development Bank (AfDB).

                                                                     7
holes, though critical for herd survival (Moritz 2008), are vulnerable to unilateral alteration if representation
in local decision-making or dispute resolution bodies is lacking (Bergius et al. 2020), secondary rights are
not recorded (McPeak & Little 2018), or arbitration and negotiation venues absent (Eberle et al. 2020).
Upfront mechanisms for decentralized decision-making and inter-community consultation are particularly
important to avoid conflicts that, with overlaps between tribal, ethnic, and religious identity, can easily
escalate and be hard to resolve (McGuirk & Nunn 2020).

Second, traditional tenure regimes often restricted women’s inheritance rights (Casari & Lisciandra 2016).2
In addition to contradicting basic tenets of equality, such discrimination undermines productivity of land
use as documented by studies showing that insecure inheritance rights reduced women’s input use (Dillon
& Voena 2018) and investment in soil fertility (Deininger et al. 2021) even during spouses’ lifetime.
Unclear inheritance arrangements increased women’s fear of land loss (Deininger et al. 2019b) and their
likelihood of being involved in land disputes (Deininger & Castagnini 2006). In Ghana, stronger female
inheritance rights encouraged women to invest on their plots and men, whose outside options were better,
to take up non-agricultural employment, supporting structural transformation (Barker 2022).

Afrobarometer data point to strong public support for gender equality with more than 70% of respondents
in favor of equal land rights for women. Yet, women’s land rights in case of divorce or inheritance often
remain fragile as in Tanzania where progressive views regarding women’s rights by members of local
judicial bodies were not reflected in actual judgements (Genicot & Hernandez-de-Benito 2022). While
changes in family law can be a first step towards shifting customary gender norms (Aldashev et al.
2012), training of officials, awareness raising, and access to mediation in specific cases is often needed
(Cecchi & Melesse 2016).

Finally, co-optation of chiefs by colonial institutions to collect taxes (Frankema & van Waijenburg 2013)
or help transfer land to outsiders via concessions (Lowes & Montero 2020) has in many settings undermined
mechanisms that traditionally underpinned trust in and accountability by such leaders (Acemoglu et al.
2014).3 Chiefs whose downward accountability has been compromised may ‘privatize’ land for personal
benefit even if this reduces social welfare (Leeson & Harris 2018), widens inequality (Obeng-Odoom
2014), or undermines sustainability (Mihaylova 2023). They may act as land brokers for outsiders (Lentz
2010); behaving like owners rather than custodians of land (Lanz et al. 2018) or let themselves be co-opted
by politicians (Chimhowu 2019) to offer political support for personal benefit rather than that of the group
they represent (de Kadt & Larreguy 2018).

2
  A documented exception is Siam's traditional usufruct land rights system in the 19th century where women’s land rights were very secure, protected
in court against challenges by investors or local elites, and supported high living standards (Chankrajang & Vechbanyongratana 2021).
3
  Systematic differences in the use of indirect rule between British and French colonial powers are still visible in higher leve ls of chiefs’ perceived
corruption and lower state capacity in former British vs. French territories (Ali et al. 2020c). This also holds for historical tribal homelands that
were split between British and French colonies, and for counties colonized by either of the two powers within Cameroon (Ali et al. 2019b).

                                                                           8
2.2 Land registries and the benefits of documented land rights

Land registries comprise a spatial and a textual component. The former, normally referred to as cadaster,
describes boundaries of the objects (land parcels) over which rights are defined, reducing the incidence of
land disputes over long time horizons (Libecap & Lueck 2011) and making land use change (Dippel et al.
2020) or assembly (Leonard & Parker 2021) easier. The textual part, referred to as the register, provides
public evidence of registrable rights (ownership, leases, mortgages etc.) held by specific individuals and
assigns priority among them as per law.4 This facilitates impersonal trade by protecting third parties’ rights
(Arrunada et al. 2019); expands the range of potential contractual partners and options by reducing the
scope for moral hazard due to asymmetric information; and provides the basis for enforcement of rights via
the courts as a last resort.

Although not costless, having rights documented and mechanisms for enforcing them clearly defined has
several advantages, namely (i) it increases investment incentives and reduces the need to spend resources
on non-productive activities to maintain land rights; (ii) it expands the length and range of potential contract
parties for land rental; (iii) it improves credit access if there are liquid sales markets and collateral can be
registered and enforced at low cost; (iv) it empowers individuals, especially women, who were traditionally
often disadvantaged by making enforcement of rights easier and encouraging entrepreneurship; (v) price
data provide a public good that can improve coordination and development of policies relying on fiscal
incentives that are normally more flexible and easier to target than command-and control approaches; and
(vi) documented rights are a key element of state capacity and the transparency and fairness needed for a
social contract to incentivize tax payment in return for public goods that can increase land prices.

Investment instead of ‘guarding labor’ and other defensive measures: Although undocumented rights are
sufficient to incentivize short-to medium-term investment, greater scales and longer duration normally
require documented rights. Rights that can be enforced via the courts have been instrumental in reducing
deforestation in Brazil (Baragwanath & Bayi 2020) and Colombia (Peña et al. 2017; Vélez et al. 2020). In
the US West, clarification of access rights to publicly owned grazing land increased productivity and use
of fallowing as much as privatization (Bühler 2023). By contrast, uncertainty on how land would be
allocated at the end of the 19th century, in turn, deterred irrigation investment and reduced output (Alston
& Smith 2022). Having rights to land clearly documented reduces the need to spend resources on contesting
them (Fetzer & Marden 2017) as discussed above, on or protecting rights (De Meza & Gould 1992),




4
  Such protection is based on either a document lodged for registration and a way to prioritize among documents (often based on the time of
registration) in a system of deeds or a search by the registrar at the point of registration (in a title registration system). See Arrunada and Garoupa
(2005) for a conceptual comparison and economic evaluation of different registration systems and Arruñada (2012) for the importance of registries
for impersonal exchange with third parties.

                                                                          9
including via physical presence (Field 2007), allowing resource reallocation to investment or more
beneficial activities.

Land rental markets: People may be concerned about losing their rights if they enter longer-term contracts.
Systematic documentation of land rights at the community level in Mexico facilitated long-term land
rentals, occupational shifts to non-agriculture, and migration (Valsecchi 2014; de Janvry et al. 2015).
Complete registration of all land and measures to ease transferability and eliminate restrictions on urban
residence rights in China almost doubled the likelihood of non-farm enterprise startups (Deininger et al.
2019a) while increasing rental market transfers of land to more productive young producers, off-farm labor
supply by older farmers, and profits through a shift from grains to vegetables and other higher value crops
(Deininger et al. 2020b). Rural land record computerization that did not alter the nature of rights but only
the ease with which they can be accessed, increased the level of rental market activity and allocative
efficiency in Pakistan by transferring land to more productive farmers (Beg 2022). Documentation of use
rights activated rental markets in Ethiopia, increasing women’s participation (Bezabih et al. 2016) and
reducing resource misallocation (Chen et al. 2022). Historically, reforms to replace oral short-term rental
contracts with written ones for a longer term, together with a public body for enforcement, fostered tenants’
investment in irrigation and drainage, leading to significant efficiency gains in Taiwan, China (Fan & Yeh
2019).

Credit access: Given its immobility and virtual indestructability, land is excellent collateral. If land markets
are active, foreclosure in case of default is possible, and lack of title prevents credit-worthy borrowers from
implementing profitable investment projects, registering land rights can quickly increase credit access and
investment (de Soto 2000). While hopes of land titling in developing countries increasing credit access
were often disappointed as one or more of these conditions were not in place, privatization of state housing
in China alleviated credit constraints by allowing households to capitalize on the value of the real estate
(Wang 2012). Data from the developed world also document the importance of this channel: Legal changes
allowing land to be used as collateral resulted in higher property values (Zevelev 2021) while exogenous
fluctuations in housing wealth improved financial well-being (Atalay & Edwards 2022) or increased
property owners’ propensity to take up entrepreneurship (Schmalz et al. 2017). In India, record digitization
improved credit access in relatively less distorted urban markets (Deininger & Goyal 2012).

Individual empowerment and risk taking: By providing implicit insurance, documented land rights enable
the individuals holding such rights to pursue more risky projects with higher average returns. Having
individual land rights documented rather than just defined in abstract makes them easier to enforce and
programs to issue documents in women’s name have been shown to increase their soil fertility investment
(Ali et al. 2014); participation in land (Holden et al. 2011), labor (Field 2007; Goldstein et al. 2018), and


                                                       10
financial markets (Ali & Deininger 2021b); and their bargaining power (Menon et al. 2017) and influence
over spending decisions (Wang 2014). Providing squatters with documented rights caused them to become
more entrepreneurial and willing to take risks in Argentina (Di Tella et al. 2007), a result mirrored by effects
of Peru’s urban titling program (Aragón et al. 2020).

State capacity for service delivery: Property registries to facilitate taxation and market operation are a key
component of states’ ability to effectively deliver public goods and their legal and fiscal capacity (Besley
& Persson 2009), the social contract, and citizens’ trust. Panel regressions for 160 countries show a strong
association between land registry development and economic growth in the 1960-2015 period (d'Arcy et
al. 2021) with effectiveness of public spending (e.g. the ability to implement large infrastructure projects)
and the ability to implement policies and elicit voluntary compliance through a fair and transparent system
rather than the value of taxes raised as the main mechanism. Property transactions yield more precise wealth
measures than a capitalization approach (Fagereng et al. 2020). Registries are also key to monitor cross-
border real estate investment (Alstadsæter et al. 2022) which substituted for cross-border financial flows
(Johannesen et al. 2020) and, together with registries of beneficial ownership, curtailed use of real estate
for money laundering (Neef et al. 2022).

Data and information: Publicity of price data from registries allows to improve market functioning, for the
public or private sector to assess impacts of actions affecting land values ex-ante, and put in place financing,
implementation, or cost recovery mechanisms. Making price data public improves market functioning
(Eerola & Lyytikainen 2015) and reduces price dispersion (Ben-Shahar & Golan 2019). It allows valuing
the size and incidence of benefits from public goods such as road maintenance (Gertler et al. 2022),
broadband access (Ahlfeldt et al. 2017), trees (Han et al. 2021), coastal preservation (Severen & Plantinga
2018) or losses from hazards such as contamination (Chang & Li 2021), radon exposure (Pinchbeck et al.
2020), proximity to nuclear plants (Coulomb & Zylberberg 2021), earthquake risk (Singh 2019), exposure
to sea-level rise (Goldsmith-Pinkham et al. 2021), or species extinction (Frank & Sudarshan 2022) to inform
public policies (Nolte 2020) or investment. It allows to assess the differential impact of shocks such as
COVID across locations (Rosenthal et al. 2022) and the effect of policies including restrictions on density
(Hilber & Vermeulen 2016) or potential buyers (Lawley 2018; Hartley et al. 2023), or congestion pricing
(Tang 2021).

2.3 The role of policy and examples of reform

The above suggests that high-cost mechanisms to ** the ability to enforce rights is more important than the
precise nature of the ways in which such rights are documented. Focusing only on credit to justify efforts
to document rights may lead to (i) a narrow emphasis on high-cost individual titling that may be neither
cost-effective nor sustainable and that, by biasing access to rights in favor of the wealthy, may increase

                                                       11
inequality ; (ii) neglect of the importance to register public land if this asset is to be sustainably managed
and yield benefits well beyond the spatial or temporal confines of current right holders and the opportunities
of group right documentation; and (iii) failure to place land registries in their legal and institutional context
and appreciate the need for constant interaction with other systems (courts, mortgage registries, personal
ID, etc.) to realize their full potential. We discuss each of these briefly below together with examples of
how they have been overcome.

Cost-effective documentation of private land: Emphasis on issuing titles without checking if current
procedural requirements and workflows are justified or need to be reformed first can make titles
unaffordable and introduce wealth bias that may undermine rather than increase many people’s land rights.
Titling costs of more than US$1,000 per title in rural Madagascar (Jacoby & Minten 2007) or Ghana (Agyei-
Holmes et al. 2020) and close to US$500 in Benin (Mekking et al. 2021) or Zambia (Honig 2021) are
neither affordable nor necessary. Often, large part of these costs can be attributed to the need for a detailed
survey. Index maps that mark parcels’ location relative to others and are fully sufficient to provide the
spatial reference needed to unambiguously describe a land parcel and have in fact been used for generations
in the UK. Such maps can be generated at very low cost from satellite imagery Indeed, it has been argued
that the emphasis on mapping may cause disputes and detract from thorough investigation of rights that is
more important to ensure sustainability and trust in the system (Arruñada 2018).

The case of Ethiopia where land-use certificates to more than 6 million households (18 million parcels)
were issued quickly in 2003–05 at low cost (< $1 per parcel) via a decentralized process implemented by
elected councils (Deininger et al. 2008) using a description of neighbors only illustrates the scope for
scaling up quickly in a decentralized manner that draws on elected local bodies. As digital tools were not
yet available at the time, this effort established paper-based local registers, with significant impact.

The program reduced conflict (Di Falco et al. 2020), strengthened women’s rights (Kumar & Quisumbing
2015) and bargaining power (Melesse et al. 2018) and spending on food and health care (Muchomba 2017).
It increased tenure security and investment in land improvements (Holden et al. 2009), soil fertility
(Melesse & Bulte 2015), and participation in informal rental markets (Holden et al. 2011) with benefits that
exceeded cost (Deininger et al. 2011). As restrictions on land sales and often also rentals remained in place,
certification reform only realized a faction of the potential productivity gains from full opening of land
markets (Chen et al. 2022).

Rwanda is the only African country with a nation-wide fully digital registry and cadaster. It titled all the
country’s 11.5 million parcels from 2011 to 2013 at a unit cost of less than US$6 (Nkurunziza 2015),
building on a completely revised legal and regulatory framework (including strong rights for women), a
carefully evaluated pilot, and the ability to pass implementing regulations to quickly respond to problems

                                                       12
as they emerged. Beyond showing that obstacles to systematically registering land at scale in Africa are
often more of a political than a technical nature, it also demonstrates the benefits from such action: 86% of
land parcels were individually or jointly owned by a woman (Ali et al. 2017); soil conservation investment
(Ali et al. 2014) and activity in land and mortgage markets increased (Ali et al. 2015). A radical reduction
of registration fees (including transfer taxes) helped the country move from rank 137 in the ‘registering
property’ part of the World Bank’s Doing Business ranking in 2005 to the top. The cost of the program
could be recouped through incremental urban property tax revenues in less than a decade with current rates
and in less than 3 years if rates were increased to 1% of property value. Fixed registration fees were very
low as a share of property value in urban areas but rather high in rural ones, leading to relatively high levels
of informality in the latter. Lowering fees for registering transactions in rural areas bo be in line with stated
willingness to pay from household surveys and exempting poor land owners would allow to eliminate
informality without jeopardizing the registry’s ability to sustain itself from fee revenue (Ali et al. 2021).

While these examples illustrate that fee reductions before launching large initiatives are feasible and may
even be required in situations where overstaffing of land agencies as a means to dispense patronage makes
implementation of progressive laws unaffordable (Hunt 2004), a more widespread response was for donors
to subsidize first registration, mostly in rural areas, a move justified with reference to the fixed cost of
creating functioning registries. This approach faces two challenges: On the one hand, the cost of service
delivery (related to parcel density) will be much lower and potential economic benefits (related to land
values) larger in urban areas, implying that an exclusive focus on rural areas is a political choice that
requires clear economic justification. This is particularly relevant as there is significant demand for
documented land rights in urban areas: in Dar es Salaam, most slumdwellers paid into a savings scheme to
finance title acquisition (Ali et al. 2016) with willingness to pay of US$200 for title instead of much cheaper
substitutes of low quality (Manara 2022),5 but supply constraints impeded an effective response (Manara
& Regan 2021). Informal residents’ willingness to pay for title was also high in urban Democratic Republic
of Congo (Balan et al. 2020). High demand for documented land rights is reported from Zambia (Ali et al.
2020a), Ghana (Ehwi et al. 2021), and Nigeria (Goodfellow & Owen 2020). In fact, efficient urban titling
programs could be self-financing if, instead of charging high upfront fees that credit constrained households
cannot afford, a small fraction of the associated increases in land values is captured ex post via land taxes
(Hawley et al. 2018). A focus on first establishing functioning urban registries is thus rational.

A second challenge is that, even if a registry is successfully established, failure to reduce the cost of
registering transactions will make subsequent registration unaffordable for most and lead to a return to


5
  While policy makers placed enormous hopes in non-transferable documents to improve credit access in rural (Stein et al. 2016) or urban areas
(Kironde 2006), these were bound to be disappointed and there were several cases where banks that had lent against such licenses were unable to
liquidate, partly due to poor quality and maintenance (Kusiluka & Chiwambo 2019).

                                                                      13
informality.6 High registration cost undermined sustainability (Atwood 1990; Pinckney & Kimuyu 1994)
even for interventions with otherwise positive effects (Agyei-Holmes et al. 2020; Fabbri & Dari-Mattiacci
2021). In Peru, a well-functioning low-cost registry was closed down in response to pressure by local
notaries, triggering a marked increase in the cost of service delivery and, as a result, informality (Gutierrez
& Molina 2020), which shows that powerful political economy forces may be at play, but also that lower-
cost delivery models are feasible if relevant regulation is put in place.

This points to procedures and standards for surveying, planning, and valuation, use of paper-based
procedures, and complexity of workflows as key pressure points all increase transaction cost and corruption
risk. Addressing these through an appropriate regulatory framework and performance standards that are
monitored can go a long way towards improving access to documented rights. This is particularly important
as the wealth bias introduced by high fees-that are affordably only for a few-will undermine public trust in
the registry and, in most African settings, can give rise to speculative acquisition of public or customary
land with negative environmental and distributional impacts.

Public land management and operationalization of group rights: Unless rights to them are registered, large
amounts of public land and the benefits they provide may be lost to the public. Moreover, documented
rights need not be individual to encourage investment or sustainable resource management; demarcation of
group or community boundaries together with regulations on how to internally manage rights or transfer
them to outsiders can be effective in protecting against encroachment if groups are cohesive and able to
rely on internal sanctions and means of conflict-resolution (Ferraro & Agrawal 2021). This was the rationale
for reforms to recognize customary land rights, possibly contingent on groups’ meeting certain criteria, by
demarcating and registering traditional authorities’ outer boundaries and using low-cost internal registers.

In many settings, these efforts did not have the desired effect. One reason is that, instead of being recognized
as having value on their own and possibly being sufficient in more remote locations where land values
remained modest and environmental risk high, documented group rights were often viewed as a first stage
towards title only for individual fields. For example in Benin, low-cost village boundary clarification
reduced tree cover loss and fires, land clearing, and inter-village border conflicts (Wren-Lewis et al. 2020).
Subsequent systematic titling never happened as planned, leading to on-demand titling instead that
provided no economic benefit (Fabbri & Dari-Mattiacci 2021) but increased conflict (Arruñada et al. 2022)
and raised suspicions about elite capture in communities less well connected to markets (Fabbri 2021).




6
  Evidence of high fees leading to ‘deformalization’ comes from Jamaica (Barnes & Griffith-Charles 2007), the Philippines (Maurer & Iyer 2008),
and-for agricultural land-Rwanda (Ali et al. 2021). In urban Argentina, Galiani and Schargrodsky (2016) report that registering an inter-family
transaction cost 27% of property values or more than 7 times average household income while registering a within-family transfer such as an
inheritance or divorce cost about 20% of property value and 5 times average monthly household income.

                                                                      14
A second reason was that regulations often increased the complexity of procedures to demarcate community
land to the point of defeating their very purpose by making them unaffordable. By mimicking procedures
for issuance of titles that the legislation had set out to simplify, they thus often ended up replicating the
wealth bias associated with on-demand titling for the rich and powerful, threatening to hollow out
community rights from within. One example is Tanzania where nearly two decades after a law establishing
‘certificates of village land’ (CVLs) to document village boundaries at low cost was hailed as a major
innovation (Alden-Wily 2003), less than 10% of villages were able to comply with complex regulations to
create a village land use plan (VLUPs) as a first step towards CVL issuance (Huggins 2018). Moreover,
rights granted via registered CVLs or (unregistered) VLUPs are often unenforceable as plans are not public
and commitment to enforcement lacking: VLUPs were repeatedly changed to eliminate pastoralists’ rights
and the government seems unwilling to enforce boundaries registered in CVLs if land is considered to be
‘unused’ and subject to investor interest (Bluwstein et al. 2018; Engström & Hajdu 2018), an issue of great
relevance for potential outside investors that is now litigated in the courts.

As efforts to secure community rights in Mozambique suffered a similar fate (Quan et al. 2013) and reform
to document customary rights in Malawi (Chikaya-Banda & Chilonga 2021) are too recent, Mexico
provides a good example. It combines a clear regulatory framework for documenting group rights with
documented impact. Customary rights at the level of the group ( ejido) were registered to more than 100
million hectares in the early 2000s.7 First, the ejido was registered as a legal entity to engage with outsiders
as a group with organs of self-governance (the executive, the assembly, and an oversight committee) that
follow clear procedural rules and its outer boundary defined. Second, internal boundaries of community
land as well as individual agricultural and housing parcels were identified and registered centrally in the
Registro Agrario Nacional (RAN) based on decisions by the assembly, supervised by a network of
independent para-legal teams (via the Procuradoria Agraria) that was publicly supported and also provided
on-demand access to legal advice and a dedicated court system. Long-term transfers of land to outsiders
under a range of options are similarly possible based on an assembly decision.

In addition to establishing clear procedures to register or transfer ejido land, there is no ambiguity on
whether land tenure is governed by the social or the private system and a procedure for communities to exit
the customary regime and move to the private system by individualizing rights with proper safeguards, in
particular the requirement for such decisions to be approved by 75% of members in a centrally supervised
assembly vote, was put in place.8 Studies show the program facilitated mechanization and higher


7
  The voluntary Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares (PROCEDE) had by 2008 certified more than 98% of
ejidos on an area of more than 100 million ha based on applications by communities (ejidos).
8
  Only about 9% of ejidos, mostly located closer to cities with higher incomes, levels of literacy, and reliance on industry and services rather than
agriculture for income exercised this right (Ramírez-Álvarez 2019). This contrasts to ‘on-demand’ opportunities for exit by individuals via private
titling practiced in many African countries which hollow out the system from within and tend to give rise to rent seeding and may foster inequality.

                                                                         15
productivity (de Janvry et al. 2015), fostering structural transformation via migration (Valsecchi 2014) and
investment (Dower & Pfutze 2013) while increasing women’s participation (García-Morán & Yates 2022).

Interoperability and policy alignment: While historically the technical complexity of documenting land
rights, reinforced by established bureaucratic structures, caused a strong preference for stand-alone titling
interventions, even successful interventions to document land rights at low or subsidized cost are unlikely
to achieve their objective if regulations in relevant areas are inadequate. Land rights documentation will be
more effective in reducing transaction costs if linked to a clear (digital) way for individuals to authenticate
their identity. Also, credit effects are contingent on viable procedures for mortgage registration or
foreclosure.

The case of Lesotho illustrates how, following reductions in the requirements for mortgage registration,
urban land titling can increase credit supply, especially for women. Regulatory reform in 2010 that, among
others simplified bureaucratic procedures (including need for Ministerial consent) to register mortgages
was followed by systematic titling in 2011-13 (Ali & Deininger 2021b). Building on a 2006 law that, for
the first time, allowed married women to independently own assets, procedural reform and titling increased
women’s level of registered rights in the short term.9 Regulatory reform and institutional restructuring
improved market functioning, in particular mortgage markets, an effect that was quick for already registered
parcels but took longer for land formalized via the systematic land registration program. In the longer term,
the stock of systematically and sporadically registered parcels significantly increased mortgage market
activity but, partly due to systematic differences in parcel characteristics that affected their marketability
and suitability as collateral, the estimated impact of the stock of sporadically registered parcels remained
larger than that of systematically registered ones 7 years after the end of the program.

In the case of Ethiopia discussed above, lack of clear regulations on how to keep registries current led to
great variation in updating procedures and quality as well as currency of registries across villages (Cochrane
& Hadis 2019). It triggered a push for ‘second round’ certification, i.e. the creation of a computerized
centralized registry for rural but not for urban areas that was implemented in 2014–20 at a cost of US$6 per
parcel (Zein 2021). Limited interest in (Bezu & Holden 2014) and benefits from this intervention (Ghebru
& Girmachew 2020) are consistent with the notion that a central registry will have higher payoffs and thus
be easier to establish and sustain in urban areas. Yet, successive efforts to digitize registries in the capital
have been unsuccessful. With restrictions on land sales and rental impeding use of land as collateral, lack
of demand may well undermine the sustainability of a fully digital rural registry.




9
 Consistent with evidence on ambiguous effects of legal reforms not backed by regulation in patriarchal societies such as India (Anderson &
Genicot 2015) or Pakistan (Beg et al. 2021), the 2006 law alone did not affect women’s access to registered land rights.

                                                                    16
2.4 Performance of African land institutions and opportunities for improvement

Table 1 combines data from a range of sources on the basis and perception of land institutions’ performance
in Africa by region. Panel A shows that formal land registries in Africa are characterized by high cost and
often poor service: Formal fees to register a land transfer (without a survey) amount to more than 7% of
parcel value on average. Limited digitization and coverage are one reason: of 53 Sub-Saharan African
countries, only two (Rwanda and Kenya) report having a digital link between registry and cadaster; four
claim to have most of the main city covered with a cadaster and a registry, and four that getting a first
instance court ruling for a typical land dispute takes below a year. Inefficient and costly service provision
reduces the scope for realizing the benefits from land rights by individuals and the state, including the scope
for land value capture: On average, African countries collect less than 0.2% of GDP in property tax revenue
vs. some 2% in developed economies overall and much more in the UK, the Republic of Korea, Singapore,
and the US.

Panel B suggests that, irrespectively of whether they are formal or customary, trust in land institutions in
Africa is low: Almost two-thirds (61%) of respondents in the Afrobarometer survey (and many more in
certain regions) think that rich people will be able to fraudulently register land they do not own. Such
opportunities are perceived to be strongly biased in favor of the wealthy. The same is true for formally
documented ownership rights: out of 11 African countries for which survey data are available, only two
provide documented land rights to more than 2% of their population and in most cases, these are biased in
favor of affluent males. Limited trust in and performance of formal institutions is in stark contrast to the
appreciation for traditional leaders.

If accompanied by proper regulation, digital technology, while not a magic solution,10 offers opportunities
to enhance the quality and interoperability of data managed by registries, reduce the cost of operating them,
and enhance their potential contribution to improving land use to increase equity, transparency,
accountability, and resilience. Three areas are particularly relevant:

First, use of digital records and procedures can reduce the cost of service delivery, increase transparency
and accountability of institutions and security of rights. It does so by adopting fully digital workflows that
rely on routine use of unique land parcel identifiers; authentication of right holders via digital IDs and
electronic signatures, digital payments, and allow establishing audit trails. This can reduce the potential for
fraud or record tampering omnipresent in paper-based systems if linked to a discontinuation of paper
records and increased quality and usefulness of land records via digital interoperability and mandatory
cross-checks (e.g., with court records or tax clearance certificates) before transactions are registered and

10
  Examples of blockchain technology being used to entrench corrupt practices (Deininger et al. 2022a) highlight that technology is not a magic
solution but that the ability of achieving desired impacts is determined by the regulatory framework.

                                                                     17
automatic updating of related records (e.g., on building permits). Moreover, automatic reporting of assessed
land values and registered land prices and associated data (e.g., transaction volumes) at granular level will
reduce transaction cost in land markets and facilitate credit supply by providing an objective basis for
valuing banks’ collateral in line with macro-prudential regulation standards, make acquiring land for large
projects to improve mobility and resilience easier by providing an objective benchmark for land values.
Linking property registries to registries of beneficial ownership also allows to address corruption, fraud,
and money laundering through cross-border real estate investment (Alstadsæter et al. 2022).

Second, availability of digital imagery either from drones (Gevaert et al. 2020) or free satellite imagery and
the capacity to easily process it (Gorelick et al. 2017) allows routine but granular analysis of land use at
scale. This reduces the cost of documenting rights on index maps but also allows to link information on
land use to information on rights, improving the scope for enforcement. Brazil’s DETER system that
monitors deforestation daily based on free imagery and processing on the Google Earth Engine cloud
computing platform to trigger enforcement or further scrutiny in cases of high risk (Doblas et al. 2022)
illustrates how this can be used to monitor compliance with environmental regulations. Making land use
information public allows to use land use at parcel to determine eligibility for public credit programs
(Assunção et al. 2020), certification of private sector supply chains (Carlson et al. 2018; zu Ermgassen et
al. 2020), or reductions in the cost of measures to enhance resilience such as index based crop insurance
(Masiza et al. 2022). Data on parcel boundaries together with satellite imagery on historical land use or
yield proxies also offers opportunities to allow unbanked farmers to establish a history of creditworthiness.

Finally, connectivity can foster decentralization by combining central data maintenance with access to and
use of authentic information by public and private bodies. By reducing cost of accessing information on
registered primary or secondary rights (including encumbrances) and allowing its sharing (subject to right
holders’ consent where required by data privacy regulation) in real time with stakeholders in private or
public sector. By indicating, for example, interest in certain transactions (e.g., leasing land or obtaining
credit at some price), this can reduce transaction cost and increase competition in and thickness of land and
financial markets, expanding the set of possible contracts and contracting partners.

Together with the ability to reference land use outcomes that are objectively verifiable via remote sensing
at high levels of granularity, connectivity provides opportunities to expand the contracting space in ways
that may allow to better insure against risk or reduce the potential for moral hazard. Reliable data on parcel
boundaries and land rights could allow to bundle cash rent with crop insurance as alternative to
sharecropping. The potential for easy registration of encumbrances or monitor cultivation activity including
harvesting at parcel level in real time using radar imagery, help reduce side-selling in contract farming and
aid reputation development. Building on private operators’ experience in documenting use rights (e.g., for


                                                      18
outgrowers and supply chain certification) and adding interoperability in ways that are only possible for the
public sector could allow to secure rights in ways that could mature in the future while opening up ways
for analytical work on how to most effectively use these to reduce rural factor market imperfections in ways
that could provide a basis for new business models by the private sector.

Connectivity, combined with the ability to use mobile money to transfer small amounts of resources at close
to zero cost also makes it easier to better protect and more effectively exercise secondary rights by gathering
consent to certain transactions electronically and automatically sharing associated current or future benefit
streams. If female co-ownership rights are enshrined in family law as in Kenya (Harari 2019), embedding
a default requirement for spousal consent to any transfers or registered transactions could strengthen
women’s rights even in the absence of joint documents. Remote connectivity also reduces the cost of
establishing and managing group rights as members can make decisions and receive payments in line with
their share without the need for physical presence or intermediaries. This may make common pool resources
and public land more valuable and contractible, including by reducing collective action issues as state-
contingent ‘Payment for Environmental Services’ (PES) schemes could be tailored to individual group
members’ behavior. It may also offer opportunities to improve enforcement of pastoralists’ use rights and
right holders’ ability to enter contingent contracts building on such rights, something that can increase
flexibility of and most likely also effectiveness of PES, e.g., by including upfront payments (Jack et al.
2022) or tailoring interactions to the specific circumstances of target groups.

The combination of increased benefits and reduced cost of documented land rights creates opportunities for
African countries to reap benefits that can translate into greater transparency, effectiveness, coverage, and
fiscal impact of their land institutions through appropriate regulatory change. Such change would include
(i) adjusting their regulatory and institutional frameworks to deliver services at scale by allowing use of
digital technology (e-signatures, mass valuation, digital lodging of surveys, etc.), interoperability, and
public monitoring; (ii) replacing high and distortionary transaction taxes by a recurrent land tax based on
mass valuation techniques and public access to assessed property values; (iii) using access to registry
information to catalyze operation of financial and other factor markets; (iv) clarifying modalities for
registering group and secondary rights, including ways to decide on management and conflict resolution
consensually and transparently; (v) establishing standards for transfer of use rights to public land to which
no formal rights exist or for public land acquisition, in a transparent and competitive way; and (vi) allowing
land users to capitalize on new opportunities to provide local and global public goods through climate
change mitigation and adaptation by providing national land use monitoring to allow documentation and
quantification of such contributions.




                                                      19
3. Land rights to help address challenges of structural transformation

Institutions that clearly define rights to agricultural land and allow such land to be transferred easily can
help reduce transaction cost in land markets and support functioning of other factor markets linked to land
markets (e.g., those for insurance and credit). Africa is also richly endowed with land that, while
traditionally often considered to be marginal, may become more valuable due to better infrastructure access
or higher demand for services that can be derived from such land. Clarifying rights to such land, which may
be public rather than private, and establishing competitive and transparent ways to assign them at the local
level can open opportunities to bring in investment and access to global markets and know-how that
bureaucratic processes were unable to tap into and that will be of increased importance to adapt to climate
change and prevent temporary shocks from escalating into persistent conflict.

3.1 Rural factor market frictions, farm growth and structural transformation

Rural land institutions are important to provide landowners and users with investment incentives and to
reduce frictions in land and other rural factor markets due to the cost of acquiring information on land
ownership and enforcing contracts. Reducing such frictions can increase productivity and support structural
transformation by expanding the range of potential contractual partners and the time horizon of contracts,
allowing tenants to make long-term investments and substitute know-how and technology for labor.

By reducing the scope for achieving an allocation of land that maximizes productivity and welfare, land
market frictions contribute to resource misallocation (Restuccia & Rogerson 2017). Measured levels of
misallocation are much larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture (Adamopoulos & Restuccia 2014).
While part of this can be attributed to measurement error (Maue et al. 2020) that is particularly pervasive
in agriculture and that can inflate the extent of measured misallocation (Gollin & Udry 2020), persistence
of large wage gaps between agricultural and non-agriculture even after careful adjustments (Lagakos et al.
2020) suggests there is considerable scope for better rural factor market functioning by documenting rights,
reducing the cost of enforcing contracts, and eliminating restrictions that might lead to adoption of sub-
optimal contractual options.

For example, in Ethiopia where land cannot be sold and some regions restrict the share of land that can be
leased out or the length of rental contracts, full marketability of agricultural land is estimated to have the
potential to increase GDP by 9% and decrease agricultural employment by 20% (Gottlieb & Grobovsek
2019). Ex ante analysis shows that such reform would be pro-poor (Restuccia 2021) and significantly
increase agricultural productivity (Chen et al. 2017).11 The national certification program realized a fraction


11
  Globally, a hypothetical shift to unrestricted transferability of land (via ‘titling’) is estimated to potentially increase output by as much as 82.5%
(Chen 2017).

                                                                          20
of these benefits (Chen et al. 2022). In Kenya, subsidies to short-term rental transferred land to younger,
land-poor, entrepreneurial farmers, resulting in higher output and value added on rented plots via more
intensive application of non-labor inputs (Acampora et al. 2022).

The relevance of land market frictions and the scope for policies to reduce them is illustrated by the case of
China where reforms implemented in a stepwise fashion over the last decades cumulatively had enormous
impact (Adamopoulos et al. 2022): reducing the scope for periodic land reallocation that had reduced
migration incentives (Giles & Mu 2018) increased off-farm labor supply and rural incomes (Zhao 2020).
Reforms to facilitate land rental fostered structural transformation (Deininger & Jin 2009), triggering
estimated increases of output and productivity by 8% and 10%, respectively (Chari et al. 2021). Complete
land registration on a pilot basis almost doubled the likelihood of non-farm enterprise startups (Deininger
et al. 2019a). Better factor market functioning allowed adjustments to offset some of the negative impacts
of climate change (Chen & Gong 2021) while cities with more elastic housing supply were able to attract
more skilled migrants and industrialize (Niu et al. 2021).

By providing former tenants or sharecroppers with secure rights to land, land reforms undertaken in Asia
in the post-WWII period improved credit market access (Iscan 2018) and fostered mechanization as well
as outmigration (Kitamura 2022) based on quick land distribution under secure and transferable rights (Jeon
& Kim 2000). Most of the large number of land reforms implemented globally (Bhattacharya et al. 2019),
however, moved more slowly and often involved politically motivated restrictions on transferability of land
or access to public goods (Fergusson et al. 2022). Inability to fully extinguish landlords’ claims created
right overlaps that impeded investment and market operation in India (Deininger et al. 2013) and Uganda
(Deininger & Ali 2008; Bird & Venables 2020). Retention of residual rights by the state also prevented
investment in Zimbabwe (Deininger et al. 2004), Ethiopia (Deininger & Jin 2006), Colombia (Albertus
2019), Peru and Mexico (Albertus et al. 2016), or the Philippines (Adamopoulos & Restuccia 2020).

In India, many parcels are too small for mechanization; eliminating all land market frictions is estimated to
allow increasing income per agricultural worker by 68% and reducing the number of farms by 82% (Foster
& Rosenzweig 2021). However, although evidence suggests it could raise productivity via machine use
(Bryan et al. 2022), achieving land consolidation via private exchanges raises complex market mechanism
design issues (Bryan et al. 2017). To overcome these issues, many European countries instead mandated
land consolidation in the post WWII period. Land consolidation programs in France, active from 1945 to
2008, led to long-term growth of population, employment, and income, but also increased the vote share of
the far right (Loumeau 2022) as they were implemented in a top-down manner with little consultation and
induced immigration flows and changes in social organization.



                                                      21
Sharecropping is often adopted as a second-best contractual form to share risk, despite associated efficiency
losses as documented in Malawi (Ricker-Gilbert et al. 2019) and other African countries (Kalkuhl et al.
2020). In Uganda, an RCT showed that higher output shares incentivize tenants to use more inputs and
cultivate riskier crops, resulting in a 60% output gain (Burchardi et al. 2019). Rather than ban sharecropping
which just tends to push such transactions into informality and may exacerbate the underlying problem,
ways to reduce the risk that triggers use of such contracts in the first place, e.g., by bundling cash rent
contracts with insurance similar to what was is done for other inputs (Bulte et al. 2020), appear a promising
topic for future research that can get a big boost from digital records.

Labor markets in rural areas also suffer from frictions. Imperfect observability of effort due to seasonality
and spatial dispersion of agricultural activities implies that farms operated by owners who have a residual
claim on profit avoid the cost of supervising hired labor, providing them with an efficiency advantage over
wage-labor operated ones (Binswanger et al. 1995). At the same time, if farms are too small to offer full
employment to owners and their family members, frictions associated with participation in off-farm labor
markets may lead to seasonal under-employment (Dillon et al. 2019) and farmers working on their farm
even at returns below the market wage, leading to an inverse relationship between farm size and
productivity as found in Rwanda (Ali & Deininger 2015), Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda (Julien et al.
2019). Evidence from India over a wider farm size range shows that such non-separability affects only
small but not large farms (Merfeld 2020) with estimated shadow wages for family labor 20% below non-
agricultural wages (Caunedo & Kala 2021). Land market restrictions can significantly reduce employment
in manufacturing and services, slowing structural change (Emran & Shilpi 2020).

As capital becomes cheaper relative to labor, the lumpy nature of capital inputs and the ability to substitute
capital for supervision (Deininger & Byerlee 2012) may counter family farmers’ labor cost advantages and
lead to a positive relationship between farm size and productivity (Eswaran & Kotwal 1986). This is
consistent with historical evidence from the US and cross-country patterns of the growing importance of
capital in agriculture with economic development (Chen 2020). As functioning of labor and other factor
markets improves, the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity indeed weakens as observed
in China (Sheng et al. 2019), Bangladesh (Gautam & Ahmed 2019), India (Deininger et al. 2018), Vietnam
(Liu et al. 2020), Brazil (Helfand & Taylor 2021) and also in Tanzania (Wineman & Jayne 2021), Kenya
(Muyanga & Jayne 2019), and Nigeria (Omotilewa et al. 2021).

In many of today’s developed countries, generational change was a key driver of structural transformation:
cross-cohort accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of factor reallocation in the US between
1870 and 1910 (Porzio et al. 2022) and globally (Hobijn et al. 2018). In the second half of the 20th century
in England and Wales, inter-generational mobility out of agriculture was aided by access to transport cost


                                                      22
and had a significant impact on structural transformation (Costas-Fernandez et al. 2022). As transaction
cost or other barriers (Kosec et al. 2018) to intergenerational land transfers inter vivos in Africa often remain
high, promotion of long-term contracts and enabling young farmers to access land and establish viable
farms early (Ricker-Gilbert & Chamberlin 2018) possibly give a boost to structural transformation.

3.2 Rights to public land and large-scale land-based investment

Increased demand for land and large scale land-based investment (LSLBI) in the wake of the 2007/08 spike
in food and commodity prices was widely expected to provide relatively land abundant African countries
with an opportunity to bring in and capitalize on know-how, market access, and increased competition
associated with such investment (Collier & Venables 2012) in line with experience in other sectors (Monge-
Naranjo 2019). Such hopes were based on the fact that, in comparable circumstances, establishment of oil
palm after 2000, though at high environmental (Li & Semedi 2021) and social (Cisneros et al. 2022) cost,
is estimated to have lifted more than a quarter of Indonesia’s rural individuals out of poverty (Edwards
2019a); increased the productivity of manufacturing firms well beyond the oil palm value chain (Kraus et
al. 2021); and improved access to employment, infrastructure (Edwards 2019b), nutrition, living standards
and human capital formation (Chrisendo et al. 2022).

Although cultivated area in Africa increased by some 50 million ha between 2013 and 2019, well above the
increase in Asia, studies point to limited direct or indirect benefits, in marked contrast to what is observed
for other types of FDI in Africa (Abebe et al. 2022), including oil drilling (Cust & Harding 2020): Large
farm establishment in Ethiopia did not create jobs and had little effect on smallholders’ access to technology
or input and insurance markets (Ali et al. 2019a). In Mozambique, use of improved practices and inputs by
smallholders adjacent to large farms increased but yields or market participation did not (Deininger & Xia
2016) and large farms may put downward pressure on wages (Glover & Jones 2019). In Zambia, spillovers
from large farm establishment were at best limited and increased competition for land (Lay et al. 2020).12
Analysis for all of Africa suggests that land acquisition for mixed or food crop use increased malnutrition
with limited positive impact on livelihoods (Kinda et al. 2022).

In addition to non-traditional investors focusing on countries with weak land governance (Arezki et al.
2015), limited positive or even negative impact can be partly attributed to use of centralized and non-
competitive mechanisms for investor identification and land transfer that often prioritized political (Bélair
2021) or territorial (Lavers 2016) over economic objectives.13 Land centrally assigned to investors was
often found occupied (‘encroached’), mired in conflict, or less suitable than expected. Respect for existing
rights (Maganga et al. 2016), safeguards (Nolte & Voget-Kleschin 2014), or disclosure (Cotula 2014) and

12
     Beyond Africa, similar results are reported from Cambodia (Anti 2021) and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Nanhthavong et al. 2020).
13
     Case studies show that political objectives may change quickly (Widengard 2019) or not be shared by local officials (Dieterle 2021).

                                                                       23
job creation or skill transfer (Nanhthavong et al. 2022) often suffered. While delays and bureaucratic
bickering led some investors to withdraw (Engström & Hajdu 2018), those that proceeded were often unable
to mitigate resulting environmental issues (Shete et al. 2016) or conflict (Sulle 2020).

Non-competitive ways of land allocation increased the likelihood of selecting investors with limited skills
and made it difficult for productive land users, including local farmers, to acquire land from unsuccessful
investors via market-based processes, especially if unused land was expected to revert to central agencies.
In Zambia, titled large farms participated less in land markets than informal small ones and failed to access
credit or achieve higher productivity, suggesting speculation as a potential reason for land acquisition (Ali
& Deininger 2022). Encouraging competitive land markets, including by taxing land-thus also creating
incentives for local authorities to plan and encourage investment or to properly extinguish dormant titles
by absentee landlords based on non-payment of such taxes-seems important to ensure that expansion of
medium-scale farms (Jayne et al. 2019) increases productivity and local welfare.14

Where such expansion happens on public land, experience suggests that land transfers via public (online)
auctions are organized by local governments to capitalize on their incentives and information access;
publicity of all contracts.15 Given smallholders’ advantage in labor-intensive products with high value-
added (Rogers et al. 2021), emphasis on upstream investment that has shown to generate larger income or
poverty gains than investment focused on land only (Van den Broeck et al. 2017) will offer greater scope
for market integration of smallholders (Dubbert 2019) and a more integrated investment approach
(Schoneveld 2022).

3.3 Anticipating climate-related challenges

Whether higher agricultural productivity will trigger intensification or area expansion is a key issue in areas
adjacent to forests. In Brazil over the 1960-2000 period, variation in rural electrification prompted credit-
constrained farmers to sustainably intensify rather than expand land-intensive activities at a large scale - in
the absence of higher productivity, deforestation in the 1970-2000 period would have been double the actual
rate (Szerman et al. 2022). Command and control measures, by targeting a 'Priority List' of municipalities
with more intense environmental monitoring and enforcement, were effective, reducing deforestation by
40% and cutting 39.5 million tons of carbon emissions, an amount that could be significantly increased by
selection of ex post optimal municipalities (Assuncao et al. 2019).




14
   To the extent that it increases tenure security (as payment receipts can be used as proof of use), and give local authorities a stake in improved
land use, a tax on land that is used commercially (beyond a certain size) could in fact be politically advantageous.
15
   Mandatory allocation of public agricultural land via competitive auction on an electronic platform (Prozorro Sales) powered by open source
software doubled public lease revenue in Ukraine and auctions organized by local rather than central government realized prices that were higher
by about 40% (Deininger et al. 2022b).

                                                                        24
To implement environmental restrictions that require landowners on about 394 million ha of private land
to conserve a share of their property under native vegetation, Brazil established the rural environmental
cadaster (CAR) as a tool for voluntary self-registration of rural properties. Joining the CAR requires that
landowners geo-reference their property boundaries and remaining forests using satellite imagery at their
own expense, possibly with NGOs support (Azevedo et al. 2017). Municipal-level analysis in Mato Grosso
(MG) and Para (PA), two states that together account for about 120 mn ha of eligible area, suggests that the
net effect of such registration was to increase deforestation by credit constrained small farms that used CAR
registration to access subsidized credit to establish pasture on areas that were previously under natural
vegetation (Jung et al. 2021). Building on the experience with linking eligibility for subsidized credit to
compliance with environmental regulation to reduce deforestation (Assunção et al. 2020), adjustments in
rules for credit access could possibly avoid such an outcome in the future.

Beyond agricultural production, demand is also expected to increase for land to provide green energy or
environmental services such as carbon storage. An early program subsidizing afforestation in Chile in 1986-
2011 seems to have realized neither economic nor environmental benefits-it triggered a decline in rural
population and increased unemployment (Jordán & Heilmayr 2022), reducing biodiversity without higher
carbon storage in above-ground biomass (Heilmayr et al. 2020), suggesting that careful design and possibly
a combination of such programs with safeguards on converting natural ecosystems will have benefits.

Programs to provide environmental services can also increase land demand and, if rights are ill-defined,
dispossess current users (Kansanga & Luginaah 2019). Evaluations of PES schemes (Börner et al. 2017)
suggest their performance can be maximized via (i) additionality, i.e., PES target areas that, without support,
are at high risk of irreversible land use change; (ii) leakage is avoided, i.e., better conservation outcomes in
target areas are not offset by worse ones in non-target areas instead; and (iii) effects are sustained over time
(Chabe-Ferret & Voia 2021). While internal enforcement is a necessary precondition for conservation (van
der Zon et al. 2023), it can be reinforced by external monitoring using remote sensing data.

Allocating PES subsidies via competitive auction can help reveal private information including on strategic
complementarities between neighboring parcels (Lewis & Polasky 2018). Auctions have been implemented
successfully in settings such as Malawi (Ajayi et al. 2012) where they increased effectiveness and reduced
cost by about 30% (Jack 2013). PES also achieved temporary reductions in deforestation in Uganda
(Jayachandran et al. 2016) that were economically viable at a cost of carbon of $39/t. If the size of incentives
exceeds the opportunity cost of environmentally inferior uses and issues of collective action (Edwards et
al. 2021) or political economy (Pailler 2018; Cisneros et al. 2021) can be resolved, competitively awarded
PES based on clear rights could offer considerable potential.



                                                       25
Climate change models predict that rising temperatures and greater frequency of adverse weather events
will disproportionately reduce agricultural productivity in Africa (Conte et al. 2021). Shocks to local food
crop production in Africa have been shown to have persistent impact on the incidence of conflict that may
spill over to neighboring areas (Harari & La Ferrara 2018). One explanation is that exogenous price changes
will affect the value of food producers’ resource endowments and the opportunity cost of engaging in
fighting relative to production (Berman et al. 2021).16

Sedentary and pastoral groups have long engaged in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship whereby
animals graze on floodplains or wetlands where they provide fertilizer in the dry season. Climate shocks
such as droughts can, e.g., by changing the timing of transhumance, transform such complementary patterns
of resource use into a confrontational relationship. Data on almost three decades of violent conflict in Africa
show that droughts in pastoral areas tend to trigger agro-pastoral conflict in neighboring agricultural areas
by exacerbating competition over scarce wetlands although political participation neutralizes this effect
(McGuirk & Nunn 2020). Better definition of rights over pastoral resources and land dispute resolution
mechanisms further reduced the extent and likelihood of violence (Eberle et al. 2020).

In the absence of adaptation investment, expected increases in temperature will shift the comparative
advantage towards non-agriculture and depress local demand for non-tradables. Trade in non-agricultural
goods is important to make up for such shortfalls: over the last five decades, cities with firms that sold their
output in global markets were able to absorb drought shocks and even expand while those that depended
on local markets only suffered significant declines as demand dried up (Henderson et al. 2017). Evidence
from Brazil over more than two decades of increased frequency and severity of droughts shows that
financial integration with other regions provides insurance against negative weather shocks in the short run.
In the long run, regions where climatic conditions had deteriorated suffered from capital outflows and lower
loan access, triggering net labor outflows even though local manufacturing absorbed some of the workers
released from the agricultural and service sectors (Albert et al. 2021).

Quantifying economic and migration impacts of climate change for 42 African countries using a GE
model with detailed data on production potential suggests that, by 2080, climate change could displace 12
percent of the SSA population and reduce real GDP by 4%. While there is considerable regional variation,
adoption of modern inputs, crop switching, trade, and urbanization all reduce the impact on migration
(Conte 2021). This reinforces the importance of secure transferable land rights to foster private investment
in adaptation and diversification into non-agricultural sectors less vulnerable to climate shocks to
prevent being caught in a subsistence trap (Nath 2020).


16
  In food consuming areas, commodity price changes will also affect real income and thus the ease of recruiting potential fighters (McGuirk &
Burke 2020).

                                                                     26
4. Urban land policies

Africa now is one of the regions with the fastest rate of urbanization globally (Henderson & Turner 2020)
and its urban population is expected to triple to more than 1 billion by 2040 (Collier 2017). Urbanization
can bring benefits through skill-based human capital externalities that foster productive jobs based on input
sharing, labor market pooling, and knowledge exchange (Rosenthal & Strange 2020), thus attracting skill
and increasing land values. But urbanization also imposes costs from congestion, contagious diseases, and
crime (Duranton & Puga 2020) that may outweigh benefits from proximity unless countered by public
investment in services and mobility, ideally financed from land price appreciation due to urbanization that
will boost global competitiveness (Venables 2017).

4.1 Land taxation and urban local service delivery

In developing countries with large informal sectors, a narrow tax base often limits the amount of taxes that
can be collected centrally, implying that for many local governments, land taxes are a key source of revenue.
Given the immobility of land, land taxation allows raising revenue to finance local public goods in a way
that is least distortive (Schwerhoff et al. 2020) and progressive (Bonnet et al. 2021). Traditionally,
transaction taxes (‘stamp duties’) were often the preferred instrument to collect such revenue from urban
properties without having to incur the cost of creating comprehensive tax maps or value properties.
Although mass valuation techniques and satellite imagery make land value capture much easier, the
regulatory environment has been slow to adjust and in Africa transaction taxes account for the lion’s share
of transfer fees of 7% on average.

Evidence from developed countries shows that even more modest transfer taxes are highly distortionary: A
1.1% land transfer tax in Toronto has been shown to lead to significant welfare losses (Dachis et al. 2012)
and, if the decision of whether to own or rent is accounted for, was estimated to incur a deadweight loss of
79% of revenue (Han et al. 2022). In the UK, transaction taxes caused large distortions to the volume,
timing, and price of property transactions (Best & Kleven 2018) and negatively affected land markets and
labor mobility (Hilber & Lyytikainen 2017; Eerola et al. 2021). While their net contribution to public
revenue is thus often modest, transfer taxes push property transactions into informality and encourage
corruption and under-reporting to a point where price data become meaningless, and registries deteriorate.
Replacing them with equivalent recurrent land tax on a much larger base is easy technically and can increase
revenue, welfare, efficiency, and transparency.

Property taxes increase owners’ incentives to use land effectively (Oates & Schwab 1997), discourage land
speculation (Norregaard 2013), and reduce vacancy rates (Segú 2020). They encourage compact urban
development (Song & Zenou 2006; Ermini & Santolini 2017) and, in an open economy, can be output-


                                                     27
enhancing (Kalkuhl & Edenhofer 2017). Local governments’ ability to raise local revenue provides the
basis for accessing the municipal bond market to, among others, generate resources for large infrastructure
investment. As local public goods will increase land values (Gonzalez-Navarro & Quintana-Domeque
2016; Coury et al. 2021) and services financed using property tax proceeds benefit local residents, property
taxes strengthen the social contract between state and taxpayers (Besley & Persson 2014). Collection of
property tax increased participation and accountability even in fragile low-capacity African settings
(Weigel 2020) with willingness to pay such taxes enhanced by better service delivery (Kresch et al. 2023).

Satellite imagery allowed cost-effective generation of urban tax maps at scale in Italy (Casaburi & Troiano
2016) and, via national programs, in India (Awasthi et al. 2020), and Brazil (Christensen & Garfias 2020).
Computer-assisted mass appraisal (CAMA) of residential property is now standard in most developed
countries (Grover et al. 2017). In the Netherlands 2.8% of GDP is raised in property tax revenue by
transparently valuing millions of properties annually in a way that is equitable, trusted and perceived as fair
as assessed property values are available publicly (Kuiiper & Kaathman 2015).

While these techniques have been successfully applied to African cities (Ali et al. 2020b), African countries
overwhelmingly use formulas (i.e., charges per property or area unit, possibly for different zones or bands)
that are less tightly linked to market values and thus more regressive. They often also require valuation
even of residential property by a licensed valuer (Franzsen & McCluskey 2017) despite this being slow,
costly, and often perceived as fraud-prone and arbitrary. If land values increase quickly, the implied long
re-valuation cycles can be associated with significant revenue loss. Focusing scarce human resources on
valuation of commercial real estate and using CAMA for frequent revaluation of residential property instead
could increase fairness and yield simultaneously.

Even with a complete tax map and market-based valuations, exempting owner-occupied housing from land
tax as practiced by many African countries, will significantly reduce property tax yield and force renters to
subsidize owners in a regressive way. Although politically expedient, such an exemption is justified neither
from an economic (Englund 2003) nor a social perspective and may undermine tax morale, especially if
taxes finance local service provision. Extremely low levels of collection-well below 10% in many published
studies-also imply that, in marked contrast to the literature that found public disclosure of tax information
and social recognition of top taxpayers to increase compliance (Slemrod et al. 2022) or be insignificant
(delCarpio 2015), public disclosure in an African context has a significant negative effect on compliance
(Regan & Manwaring 2023). This is consistent with the notion that individuals overestimate compliance
levels and, once learning the truth, stop complying to not be taken advantage of.

Having an urban registry allows to use the need for a tax clearance certificate before any transfer, mortgage,
or other encumbrance on a property can be registered as a low-cost but effective option to lift compliance

                                                      28
above the low levels documented for Africa. Such a measure treats property tax arrears as a high priority
lien on the property and can be designed to act as implicit deferral of property dues, thus addressing
concerns about property taxes reducing owners’ liquidity that have been raised in the literature (Brockmeyer
et al. 2020). Other options to increase payment include linking tax payment more explicitly to local service
provision (including the possibility of withholding municipal services in case of non-payment), and, In
systems that still rely on manual distribution of bills and a need to pay in person by queuing at government
offices, allowing electronic billing and payment to reduce compliance cost (McCluskey et al. 2018).17

The example of Nigeria where, with World Bank support, more than 30 states enumerated the majority of
their urban properties based on satellite imagery in slightly more than a year and used this as a launchpad
to improve services and make acquisition of documented land rights easier (Deininger et al. 2020a), in line
with evidence from Ghana (Dzansi et al. 2022), DRC (Balan et al. 2020), and Senegal (Knebelman 2021).
These factors led experts to conclude that taxation of urban land and property is Africa’s largest source of
untapped revenue (Collier et al. 2017). Even if a property registry is absent, creating a property tax roll can
be an low-cost way of documenting use rights that can then mature over time and generate data needed for
effective local service delivery and planning. Linking efforts to increase property taxation to visible
reductions in registration or transaction fees could remove a major obstacle to establishment and
maintenance of urban land registries, improve welfare, and yield political benefits if tax payment opens a
path to acquiring real rights while at the same time creating enforcement capacity the lack of which has
thus far bedeviled most efforts to increase property taxation in Africa.

4.2 Supporting compact and dense urban development

Global data suggests that African cities are land-intensive, i.e. they consume lot of land and achieve density
via crowding in slums rather than investment in height (Esch et al. 2022). This makes for sprawling cities
with limited mobility (Peralta Quiros et al. 2019) where poor individuals can access only a limited number
of jobs (Nakamura & Avner 2021). Land-intensive urban growth increases cities’ net carbon footprint,18
pollution exposure (Yao et al. 2021), and the cost of providing public services (Ashraf et al. 2021) including
transport (Gendron-Carrier et al. 2022). Intra-city mobility increased knowledge spillovers and innovation
in the US (Roche 2020) and is linked to higher economic growth in African cities (Brandily & Rauch 2020),
suggesting that such sprawling expansion patterns may negatively affect cities’ growth potential.

To improve living conditions by regularizing slum residents’ tenure, two challenges need to be addressed:
Slum formalization may encourage land invasions farther from the city in the hope of future regularization

17
   In a randomized experiment in Zambia, SMS reminders increased payment significantly, especially for those on a network that allowed mobile
payment. Effects were particularly large for payers outside the capital (Ali & Deininger 2021a).
18
   Engineering studies that a ccount for cities’ total life-cycle GHG emissions suggest 7 to 27 floor buildings are optimal (Resch et al. 2016),
though high density low rises may be preferable for stable populations (Pomponi et al. 2021). African cities have less than 2 floors on average.

                                                                      29
(Smolka & Biderman 2012), resulting in a vicious cycle. Slum upgrading programs that fail to provide
transferable property rights may also inadvertently block gradual redevelopment. For example, thirty years
after a large scale slum upgrading program that involved more than 5 million slum dwellers in Indonesia
over 1969-84, project areas were more informal and denser with 50% fewer high-rises; more fragmented
land holdings; and land values lower by an average of 12% than in untreated neighboring areas, a finding
that is attributed to the fact that land rights awarded to program beneficiaries were restrictive and not
marketable (Harari & Wong 2019). Experiments in Latin America that provided randomly selected poor
slumdwellers with better housing without stronger property rights had no direct effect on durable good
ownership or labor market outcomes (Galiani et al. 2017) and only transitory indirect effects (Galiani et al.
2021), in contrast to ‘site and services’ projects.

The size of projected population inflows to African cities implies that providing the floorspace needed will
require complementing vertical growth with area expansion. As 30%–50% of a city’s surface is used for
public spaces, public land use patterns and development of arterial infrastructure provide strong signals to
investors in ways that are highly persistent over time (Baruah et al. 2021). In Tanzania, public provision of
arterial infrastructure and basic services ‘site and service’ projects in the 1970s helped crowd in private
investment by allowing owners to incrementally upgrade structures: 3-4 decades after the program, treated
areas had larger buildings, better electricity access, and superior socio-economic outcomes than untreated
ones as and slums that had been upgraded at much higher cost (Michaels et al. 2021). Deploying arterial
infrastructure ahead of development also allows public services to be provided more cost-effectively, at
about one-third of what it would cost to provide the same services ex post (Smolka & Biderman 2012).

While barriers to land and financial markets arising from high levels of informality and limited credit market
access are one reason for limited investment in height, land use regulations exacerbate such effects. Many
African cities impose minimum lot sizes or limit floor-area ratios (Lall 2017), directly constraining vertical
development and making housing more expensive (Cavalcanti et al. 2019). As many existing structures fail
to comply with such rules, enforcement is often discretionary (Tellman et al. 2021), giving rise to rent-
seeking (Cai et al. 2017). By increasing formalization cost, such regulations impose a labor tax that further
limits labor market participation, especially by women (Field 2007).

Unaffordability of floorspace tends to push poor people into informal settlements in hazardous locations
that may be established on private (Brueckner & Selod 2009; Brueckner 2013) or public (Shah 2014) land
at cities’ fringe with poor access to services that favor diseases (Brotherhood et al. 2022). Slums are often
organized by individuals with political (Obala & Mattingly 2014) or ethnic (Marx et al. 2019) connections.
In Kibera, Nairobi’s main slum, benefits from redeveloping have been calculated to amount to more than
30 times the typical annual slum rent payments by all slum households even after fully compensating


                                                      30
landlords (Henderson et al. 2021) but seems politically unfeasible, suggesting that in some cases households
may indeed be trapped in slums (Marx et al. 2013).

In Uruguay, a subsidy to middle-income housing had external effects on house prices, which increased by
12%, largely driven by changes in the neighborhood income mix (González-Pampillón 2022). In Mumbai,
redevelopment of informal areas occupying some 15% of the city’s area in 2006-10 resulted in large but
unevenly distributed gains, raising the question of whether it is possible to compensate those losing out
(Gechter & Tsivanidis 2020). Transferable vouchers are one option (Kumar 2021) while requirements to
build mixed income housing as part of redevelopment programs were effective in distributing gains more
equitably in the UK (Blanco & Neri 2022). Mixed-use zoning has been shown to increase property values
in Europe (Koster & Rouwendal 2012) and the US (Nakamura et al. 2018). Large urban redevelopment
programs from the 1960s in the US (Collins & Shester 2013; Hartley et al. 2021) also point to potential
gains from redevelopment.

In light of secular increases in urban land values (Knoll et al. 2017), decisions on acquisition or transfer of
what land to acquire for public purpose or zoning regulations will have distributional consequences and can
be a major source of corruption (Klopp 2000; Southall 2005). For more than a million transactions of urban
public land in China, influential party members obtained price discounts of 55%–60% and officials
providing such discounts were 23% more likely to be promoted to leadership positions (Chen & Kung
2019). Beyond causing immediate loss of public revenues, this may also have compromised longer term
performance: data from close to 1,500 industrial parks in China suggests that those that had their land
allocated based on economic potential rather than political connections generated more manufacturing jobs
and attracted higher levels of foreign direct investment than those that were not (Kahn et al. 2021).

Comprehensive valuation of properties and publication of assessed values will also generate data to improve
land market transparency; provide a benchmark for evaluating investments or providing compensation in
case of land acquisition for public purpose to making holdouts less likely (Schafer & Singh 2018) and allow
more rapid infrastructure construction. Investments in bus transit (Balboni et al. 2021; Tsivanidis 2021) or
metros (Du & Zheng 2020; Zárate 2022) to increase mobility can enhance access to productive jobs or
formality and trigger land appreciation in excess of project cost (Gupta et al. 2022), possibly warranting
use of other instruments to capture land value to either recoup investment costs ex post or allow public
bodies to issue bonds to finance such investment.

Acquiring land for infrastructure construction is easier if rights are defined and land prices or valuations
for tax purposes are public to provide a floor for monetary compensation that could be adjusted to specific
contexts to ensure those affected by expropriation are not made worse off. Landowners with prior non-farm
job experience were better able to adjust to expropriation shocks in Ethiopia (Mezgebo & Porter 2020) and

                                                      31
China where expropriation also generated less resentment towards government officials if projects yielded
public benefits and local governance was transparent (Sha 2022). Widely used instruments such as land
pooling (Lozano-Gracia et al. 2013) that give owners a stake in future development may be preferable to
straight expropriation, especially in settings where land values appreciate.

5. Conclusion and policy implications

New digital opportunities provide an enormous opportunity for African countries to improve quality of land
service delivery to address informality and improve access to finance in urban areas, expand functioning of
rural factor markets, strengthen resilience to climate risks, and empower women and other groups of land
users whose rights have traditionally often been ignored in practice. To capitalize on these opportunities,
legal, regulatory, and institutional change is needed in three dimensions. First, to eliminate supply-side
constraints such as survey fees and procedures that impeded first-time registration of titles in urban areas
and precluded registration of other use rights or rights to public land even in settings where such rights
enjoy legal recognition. Second, to improve the quality of registry information and eliminate barriers to
registering and enforcing contracts involving registered rights. Last but by no means least, there is a need
to ensure private benefits from more secure land rights are balanced by the public interest by (i) taking
measures (including regulation and publication of prices) to ensure competitive land markets; (ii) planning
land use in a way that is transparent and that provides a basis for public infrastructure provision to guide
and leverage private investment; and (iii) taxing land and increases in its value in a manner that supports
delivery of local public services and, by allowing local governments to benefit from actions that increase
land values, contributes to effective decentralization.

While this provides an opportunity to go beyond a narrow project-centered focus on individual titling, it
also requires adjusting general principles to local contexts including the political economy surrounding land
institutions. Supporting changes in legal and institutional arrangements will thus require evidence-based
analytical work and policy advice at country level to help prioritize and adjust regulatory frameworks and
institutional structures in ways that allow effectively taking advantage of new opportunities. Objective data
on the performance of land institutions-ideally sourced directly from digital registries via API-and quality
of the regulatory framework in an way that is comparable globally and that can be linked to benchmarks in
a way that overcomes the shortcomings of perception-based indicators is an opportunity for institutions
such as the World Bank have a strong comparative advantage could exercise leadership to create momentum
and then provide financial support for reforms that could improve African countries’ ability to address the
challenges facing them in the years and decades to come.




                                                      32
Table 1: Objective and subjective indicators on land service delivery in African regions
  Variable                             Central             East            North             South            West              Total
                                        Africa           Africa            Africa           Africa            Africa
  Panel A: Land registry information
  Registration cost (%)                   9.3              5.3               4.7              6.9               7.2              7.02
  # of ctries w. digital registry          1                1                 0                1                 0                3
  # of ctries dig. Cadaster                1                1                 1                0                 1                4
  Reg&Cad. digital & linked                1                1                 0                0                 0                2
  Main city in register                    1                0                 0                4                 1                6
  Main city in cadaster                    1                0                 1                3                 1                6
  Court decision in < 1 year               1                1                 0                1                 1                4
  No. of countries                        12                7                 6                12               16                53
  Panel B: Survey information
  Can get land information             0.197          0.208              0.093             0.210             0.189             0.189
  Rich people can defraud              0.754          0.656              0.538             0.603             0.598             0.613
  Poor people can defraud              0.158          0.120              0.167             0.194             0.161             0.167
  Support women’s rights               0.778          0.731              0.470             0.795             0.714             0.723
  No. of countries                       3               3                 3                 10                15                34
Note: In panel A, row 1 reports cost of registering a property transaction (without a survey) as percentage of property value while
rows 2-6 report the number of countries with a digital registry, a digital cadaster (not just scanned survey plans), or a digital registry
and cadaster that are linked, most of the properties in the main city in the register or the cadaster, and the ability to obtain a first
instance court decision for a typical land dispute in less than a year. Registration cost is as a share of property value. All information
is based on 2020 World Bank ‘Registering Property’ Data.
For panel B, ‘Can get land information’ is the share of those responding ‘very likely’ to the question ‘If you went to the local lands
office to find out who owns a piece of land in your community, how likely is it that you could get this information?’ Fraudulent
registration (ordinary and rich) tabulates the share of respondents who think it is very likely for an ordinary or a rich person,
respectively, to ‘…pay a bribe or use personal connections to get away with registering land that does not belong to them’ Women’s
rights is the share who ‘agree or strongly agree’ with the statement ‘Women should have the same rights as men to own and inherit
land’. All data are based on the Afrobarometer Survey Round 7.




                                                                   33
References

Abebe, G., McMillan, M., Serafinelli, M., 2022. Foreign direct investment and knowledge diffusion in poor locations. Journal of
          Development Economics 158, 102926
Acampora, M., Casaburi, L., Willis, J., 2022. Land rental markets: Experimental evidence from Kenya. University of Zurich,
          Zurich
Acemoglu, D., Reed, T., Robinson, J.A., 2014. Chiefs: Economic Development and Elite Control of Civil Society in Sierra
          Leone. Journal of Political Economy 122, 319-368
Adam, J.N., Adams, T., Gerber, J.-D., 2021. The Politics of Decentralization: Competition in Land Administration and
          Management in Ghana. Land 10
Adamopoulos, T., Brandt, L., Chen, C., Restuccia, D., Wei, X., 2022. Land Security and Mobility Frictions. National Bureau of
          Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 29666
Adamopoulos, T., Restuccia, D., 2014. The Size Distribution of Farms and International Productivity Differences. American
          Economic Review 104, 1667-1697
Adamopoulos, T., Restuccia, D., 2020. Land Reform and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Micro Data. American
          Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 12, 1-39
Agyei-Holmes, A., Buehren, N., Goldstein, M., Osei, R., Osei-Akoto, I., Udry, C., 2020. The Effects of Land Title Registration
          on Tenure Security, Investment and the Allocation of Productive Resources. The World Bank, Washington, DC.
Ahlfeldt, G., Koutroumpis, P., Valletti, T., 2017. Speed 2.0: Evaluating Access to Universal Digital Highways. Journal of the
          European Economic Association 15, 586-625
Ajayi, O.C., Jack, B.K., Leimona, B., 2012. Auction Design for the Private Provision of Public Goods in Developing Countries:
          Lessons from Payments for Environmental Services in Malawi and Indonesia. World Development 40, 1213-1223
Albert, C., Bustos, P., Ponticelli, J., 2021. The Effects of Climate Change on Labor and Capital Reallocation. National Bureau of
          Economic Research Working Paper #28995
Albertus, M., 2019. The Effect of Commodity Price Shocks on Public Lands Distribution: Evidence from Colombia. World
          Development 113, 294-308
Albertus, M., Diaz-Cayeros, A., Magaloni, B., Weingast, B.R., 2016. Authoritarian Survival and Poverty Traps: Land Reform in
          Mexico. World Development 77, 154-170
Aldashev, G., Chaara, I., Platteau, J.P., Wahhaj, Z., 2012. Using the Law to Change the Custom. Journal of Development
          Economics 97, 182-200
Alden-Wily, L., 2003. Community-based land tenure management: Questions and answers about Tanzania's new Village Land
          Act, 1999. In: IIED Issues Paper 120, London
Alden Wily, L., 2018. Collective Land Ownership in the 21st Century: Overview of Global Trends. Land 7, 68
Ali, D., Deininger, K., 2021a. Can mobile reminders and electronic payment options increase Africa’s property tax collec tion?
          Evidence from a randomized experiment in Zambia. The World Bank, Washington, DC.
Ali, D., Deininger, K., Harris, A., 2019a. Does Large Farm Establishment Create Benefits for Neighboring Smallholders?
          Evidence from Ethiopia. Land Economics 95, 71-90
Ali, D., Deininger, K., Hilhorst, T., Kakungu, F., Yi, Y., 2020a. Making Secure Land Tenure Count for Global Development
          Goals and National Policy: Evidence from Zambia. The World Bank, Washington, DC.
Ali, D.A., Collin, M., Deininger, K., Dercon, S., Sandefur, J., Zeitlin, A., 2016. Small Price Incentives Increase Women's Access
          to Land Titles in Tanzania. Journal of Development Economics 123, 107-122
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., 2015. Is There a Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture? Evidence from Rwanda.
          Land Economics 91, 317-343
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., 2022. Institutional determinants of large land-based investments’ performance in Zambia: Does title
          enhance productivity and structural transformation? World Development 157, 105932
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., Duponchel, M., 2017. New Ways to Assess and Enhance Land Registry Sustainability: Evidence from
          Rwanda. World Development 99, 377-394
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., Goldstein, M., 2014. Environmental and gender impacts of land tenure regularization in Africa: Pilot
          evidence from Rwanda. Journal of Development Economics 110, 262-275
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., Goldstein, M., La Ferrara, E., 2015. Investment and market impacts of land tenure regularization in
          Rwanda. In: World Bank Policy Research Paper, Washington, DC
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., Mahofa, G., Nyakulama, R., 2021. Sustaining land registration benefits by addressing the challenges of
          reversion to informality in Rwanda. Land Use Policy 110, 104317
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K., Wild, M., 2020b. Using satellite imagery to create tax maps and enhance local revenue collection.
          Applied Economics 52, 415-429
Ali, D.A., Deininger, K.W., 2021b. Using Registry Data to Assess Gender-Differentiated Land and Credit Market Effects of
          Urban Land Policy Reform: Evidence from Lesotho. The World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper Series: 9681
Ali, M., Fjeldstad, O.-H., Jiang, B., Shifa, A.B., 2019b. Colonial Legacy, State-Building and the Salience of Ethnicity in Sub-
          Saharan Africa. Economic Journal 129, 1048-1081
Ali, M., Fjeldstad, O.-H., Shifa, A.B., 2020c. European Colonization and the Corruption of Local Elites: The Case of Chiefs in
          Africa. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 179, 80-100


                                                               34
Alstadsæter, A., Planterose, B., Zucman, G., Økland, A., 2022. Who Owns Offshore Real Estate? Evidence from Dubai. In: EU
            Tax Observatory Working Paper 1, Paris
Alston, E., Smith, S.M., 2022. Development Derailed: Policy Uncertainty and Coordinated Investment. Journal of Law and
            Economics 65, 39-76
Anderson, S., Genicot, G., 2015. Suicide and Property Rights in India. Journal of Development Economics 114, 64-78
Anti, S., 2021. Land Grabs and Labor in Cambodia. Journal of Development Economics 149
Aragón, F.M., Molina, O., Outes-León, I.W., 2020. Property rights and risk aversion: Evidence from a titling program. World
            Development 134, 105020
Arezki, R., Deininger, K., Selod, H., 2015. What Drives the Global “Land Rush”? The World Bank Economic Review 29, 207 -
            233
Arruñada, B., 2012. Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange: Theory and policy of contractual registries. University of
            Chicago Press, Chicago.
Arruñada, B., 2018. Evolving practice in land demarcation. Land Use Policy 77, 661-675
Arruñada, B., Fabbri, M., Faure, M., 2022. Land Titling and Litigation. The Journal of law & economics 65, 131-156
Arrunada, B., Garoupa, N., 2005. The Choice of Titling System in Land. Journal of Law and Economics 48, 709-727
Arrunada, B., Zanarone, G., Garoupa, N., 2019. Property Rights in Sequential Exchange. Journal of Law, Economics, and
            Organization 35, 127-153
Ashraf, N., Glaeser, E., Holland, A., Steinberg, B.M., 2021. Water, Health and Wealth: The Impact of Piped Water Outages on
            Disease Prevalence and Financial Transactions in Zambia. Economica 88, 755-781
Assunção, J., Gandour, C., Rocha, R., Rocha, R., 2020. The Effect of Rural Credit on Deforestation: Evidence from the Brazilian
            Amazon. The Economic Journal 130, 290-330
Assuncao, J., McMillan, R., Murphy, J., Souza-Rodrigues, E., 2019. Optimal Environmental Targeting in the Amazon Rainforest.
            National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 25636
Atalay, K., Edwards, R., 2022. House prices, housing wealth and financial well-being. Journal of Urban Economics 129, 103438
Atwood, D.A., 1990. Land Registration in Africa: The Impact on Agricultural Production. World Development 18, 659-671
Awasthi, R., Nagarajan, M., Deininger, K.W., 2020. Property taxation in India: Issues impacting revenue performance and
            suggestions for reform. Land Use Policy, 104539
Azevedo, A.A., Rajão, R., Costa, M.A., Stabile, M.C.C., Macedo, M.N., dos Reis, T.N.P., Alencar, A., Soares-Filho, B.S.,
            Pacheco, R., 2017. Limits of Brazil’s Forest Code as a means to end illegal deforestation. Proceedings of the Nationa l
            Academy of Sciences 114, 7653
Balan, P., Bergeron, A., Tourek, G., Weigel, J., 2020. Land Formalization in Weak States: Experimental Evidence from Urban
            Property Titling in the D.R. Congo. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Baland, J.M., Francois, P., 2005. Commons as Insurance and the Welfare Impact of Privatization. Journal of Public Economics
            89, 211-231
Balboni, C., Bryan, G., Morten, M., Siddiqi, B., 2021. Could Gentrification Stop the Poor from Benefiting from Urban
            Improvements? AEA Papers and Proceedings 111, 532-537
Baldwin, K., 2018. Elected MPs, Traditional Chiefs, and Local Public Goods: Evidence on the Role of Leaders in Co-Production
            From Rural Zambia. Comparative Political Studies 52, 1925-1956
Bambio, Y., Bouayad Agha, S., 2018. Land Tenure Security and Investment: Does Strength of Land Right Really Matter in Rural
            Burkina Faso? World Development 111, 130-147
Baragwanath, K., Bayi, E., 2020. Collective property rights reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Proceedings of the
            National Academy of Sciences 117, 20495
Barker, N., 2022. The Effects of Female Land Inheritance on Economic Productivity in Ghana. University of Chicago, Chicago
Barnes, G., Griffith-Charles, C., 2007. Assessing the formal land market and deformalization of property in St. Lucia. Land Use
            Policy 24, 494-501
Baruah, N.G., Henderson, J.V., Peng, C., 2021. Colonial Legacies: Shaping African Cities. Journal of Economic Geography 21,
            29-65
Basurto, M.P., Dupas, P., Robinson, J., 2020. Decentralization and Efficiency of Subsidy Targeting: Evidence from Chiefs in
            Rural Malawi. Journal of Public Economics 185
Beck, U., Bjerge, B., Fafchamps, M., 2019. The Role of Social Ties in Factor Allocation. World Bank Economic Review 33,
            598-621
Beg, S., 2022. Digitization and Development: Property Rights Security, and Land and Labor Markets. Journal of the European
            Economic Association 20, 395-429
Beg, S., Field, E., Lebow, J., Vyborny, K., 2021. Identity-Verified Land Records and Female Access to Land and Inheritance. In:
            Working Paper. Duke University, Chapel Hill NC
Bélair, J., 2021. Farmland investments in Tanzania: The impact of protected domestic markets and patronage relations. World
            Development 139, 105298
Ben-Shahar, D., Golan, R., 2019. Improved information shock and price dispersion: A natural experiment in the housing market.
            Journal of Urban Economics 112, 70-84
Bergius, M., Benjaminsen, T.A., Maganga, F., Buhaug, H., 2020. Green economy, degradation narratives, and land-use conflicts
            in Tanzania. World Development 129, 104850



                                                                35
Berman, N., Couttenier, M., Soubeyran, R., 2021. Fertile Ground for Conflict. Journal of the European Economic Association 19,
           82-127
Besley, T., 1995. Property Rights and Investment Incentives: Theory and Evidence from Ghana. Journal of Political Economy
           103, 903-937
Besley, T., Persson, T., 2009. The Origins of State Capacity: Property Rights, Taxation, and Politics. American Economic
           Review 99, 1218-1244
Besley, T., Persson, T., 2014. Why Do Developing Countries Tax So Little? Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, 99-120
Best, M.C., Kleven, H.J., 2018. Housing Market Responses to Transaction Taxes: Evidence From Notches and Stimulus in the
           U.K. Review of Economic Studies 85, 157-193
Bezabih, M., Holden, S., Mannberg, A., 2016. The Role of Land Certification in Reducing Gaps in Productivity between Male-
           and Female-Owned Farms in Rural Ethiopia. Journal of Development Studies 52, 360-376
Bezu, S., Holden, S., 2014. Demand for second-stage land certification in Ethiopia: Evidence from household panel data. Land
           Use Policy 41, 193-205
Bhattacharya, P.S., Mitra, D., Ulubaşoğlu, M.A., 2019. The political economy of land reform enactments: New cross -national
           evidence (1900–2010). Journal of Development Economics 139, 50-68
Binswanger, H.P., Deininger, K., Feder, G., 1995. Power, Distortions, Revolt and Reform in Agricultural Land Relations.
           Handbook of development economics 3B, 2659-2772
Bird, J., Venables, A.J., 2020. Land Tenure and Land-Use in a Developing City: A Quantitative Spatial Model Applied to
           Kampala, Uganda. Journal of Urban Economics 119
Blanco, H., Neri, L., 2022. Knocking it Down and Mixing it Up: Spillover Effects of Public Housing Regenerations. In: Workign
           Paper, New York
Bluwstein, J., Lund, J., Askew, K., Stein, H., Noe, C., Odgaard, R., Maganga, F., Engström, L., 2018. Between dependence and
           deprivation: The interlocking nature of land alienation in Tanzania. Journal of Agrarian Change 18
Bonnet, O., Chapelle, G., Trannoy, A., Wasmer, E., 2021. Land Is Back, It Should Be Taxed, It Can Be Taxed. European
           Economic Review 134
Boone, C., 2017. Sons of the Soil Conflict in Africa: Institutional Determinants of Ethnic Conflict Over Land. World
           Development 96, 276-293
Börner, J., Baylis, K., Corbera, E., Ezzine-de-Blas, D., Honey-Rosés, J., Persson, U.M., Wunder, S., 2017. The Effectiveness of
           Payments for Environmental Services. World Development 96, 359-374
Brandily, P., Rauch, F., 2020. Within-city roads and urban growh. London School of Economics, London
Brasselle, A.S., Gaspart, F., Platteau, J.P., 2002. Land Tenure Security and Investment Incentives: Puzzling Evidence from
           Burkina Faso. Journal of Development Economics 67, 373-418
Brockmeyer, A., Estefan, A., Ramirez Arras, K., Suarez Serrato, J.C., 2020. Taxing Property in Developing Countries: Theory
           and Evidence from Mexico. World Bank, Washington DC
Bros, C., Desdoigts, A., Kouadio, H., 2019. Land Tenure Insecurity as an Investment Incentive: The Case of Migrant Cocoa
           Farmers and Settlers in Ivory Coast. Journal of African Economies 28, 147-175
Brotherhood, L., Cavalcanti, T., Da Mata, D., Santos, C., 2022. Slums and pandemics. Journal of Development Economics 157,
           102882
Bruce, J.W., Migot-Adholla, S.E., 1994. Searching for land tenure security in Africa. Kendall/Hunt Publishers, Dubuque, IA.
Brueckner, J.K., 2013. Urban Squatting with Rent-Seeking Organizers. Regional Science and Urban Economics 43, 561-569
Brueckner, J.K., Selod, H., 2009. A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries.
           American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1, 28-51
Bryan, G., de Quidt, J., Wilkening, T., Yadav, N., 2017. Land Trade and Development: A Market Design Approach. CESifo
           Group Munich, CESifo Working Paper Series: 6557
Bryan, G., Quidt, J.d., Silva-Vargas, M., Wilkening, T., Yadav, N., 2022. Market Design for Land Trade: Evidence from Uganda
           and Kenya. London School of Economics, London
Bubb, R., 2013. The Evolution of Property Rights: State Law or Informal Norms? Journal of Law and Economics 56, 555-594
Bühler, M., 2023. On the Other Side of the Fence: Property Rights and Productivity in the United States. Journal of the European
           Economic Association 21, 93-134
Bulte, E., Cecchi, F., Lensink, R., Marr, A., van Asseldonk, M., 2020. Does bundling crop insurance with certified seeds crowd-
           in investments? Experimental evidence from Kenya. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 180, 744-757
Burchardi, K.B., Gulesci, S., Lerva, B., Sulaiman, M., 2019. Moral Hazard: Experimental Evidence from Tenancy Contracts.
           Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, 281-347
Cai, H., Wang, Z., Zhang, Q., 2017. To build above the limit? Implementation of land use regulations in urban China. Journal of
           Urban Economics 98, 223-233
Carlson, K.M., Heilmayr, R., Gibbs, H.K., Noojipady, P., Burns, D.N., Morton, D.C., Walker, N.F., Paoli, G.D., Kremen, C.,
           2018. Effect of oil palm sustainability certification on deforestation and fire in Indonesia. Proceedings of the National
           Academy of Sciences 115, 121
Casaburi, L., Troiano, U., 2016. Ghost-House Busters: The Electoral Response to a Large Anti-tax Evasion Program. Quarterly
           Journal of Economics 131, 273-314
Casari, M., Lisciandra, M., 2016. Gender Discrimination in Property Rights: Six Centuries of Commons Governance in the Alps.
           The Journal of Economic History 76, 559-594


                                                                36
Caunedo, J., Kala, N., 2021. Mechanizing Agriculture. MIT Working Paper, Cambridge MA
Cavalcanti, T., Da Mata, D., Santos, M., 2019. On the Determinants of Slum Formation. Economic Journal 129, 1971-1991
Cecchi, F., Melesse, M.B., 2016. Formal law and customary change: A lab-in-field experiment in Ethiopia. Journal of Economic
           Behavior & Organization 125, 67-85
Chabe-Ferret, S., Voia, A., 2021. Are forest conservation programs a cost-effective way to fight climate change? A meta-
           analysis. Toulouse School of Economics, Toulouse
Chamberlin, J., Ricker-Gilbert, J., 2016. Participation in Rural Land Rental Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa: Who Benefits and by
           How Much? Evidence from Malawi and Zambia. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 98, 1507-1528
Chang, Z., Li, X., 2021. How Regulation on Environmental Information Disclosure Affects Brownfield Prices in China: A
           Difference-in-Differences (DID) Analysis. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 64, 308-333
Chankrajang, T., Vechbanyongratana, J., 2021. Land, Ladies, and the Law: A Case Study on Women's Land Rights and Welfare
           in Southeast Asia in the Nineteenth Century. Economic History Review 74, 138-163
Chari, A., Liu, E.M., Wang, S.-Y., Wang, Y., 2021. Property Rights, Land Misallocation, and Agricultural Efficiency in China.
           Review of Economic Studies 88, 1831-1862
Chen, C., 2017. Untitled Land, Occupational Choice, and Agricultural Productivity. American Economic Journal:
           Macroeconomics 9, 91-121
Chen, C., 2020. Technology adoption, capital deepening, and international productivity differences. Journal of Development
           Economics 143, 102388
Chen, C., Restuccia, D., Santaeulalia-Llopis, R., 2017. The Effects of Land Markets on Resource Allocation and Agricultural
           Productivity. National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 24034
Chen, C., Restuccia, D., Santaeulàlia-Llopis, R., 2022. The effects of land markets on resource allocation and agricultural
           productivity. Review of Economic Dynamics 45, 41-54
Chen, S., Gong, B., 2021. Response and adaptation of agriculture to climate change: Evidence from China. Journal of
           Development Economics 148, 102557
Chen, T., Kung, J.K.-s., 2019. Busting the 'Princelings': The Campaign against Corruption in China's Primary Land Market.
           Quarterly Journal of Economics 134, 185-226
Chikaya-Banda, J., Chilonga, D., 2021. Key challenges to advancing land tenure security through land governance in Malawi:
           Impact of land reform processes on implementation efforts. Land Use Policy 110, 104994
Chimhowu, A., 2019. The ‘new’ African customary land tenure. Characteristic, features and policy implications of a new
           paradigm. Land Use Policy 81, 897-903
Chrisendo, D., Siregar, H., Qaim, M., 2022. Oil palm cultivation improves living standards and human capital formation in
           smallholder farm households. World Development 159, 106034
Christensen, D., Garfias, F., 2020. The Politics of Property Taxation: Fiscal Infrastructure and Electoral Incentives in Brazil. The
           Journal of Politics
Cisneros, E., Hellmundt, T., Kis-Katos, K., 2022. Conflicts of rural transformation: The effects of oil palm expansion in
           Indonesia University of Göttingen, Göttingen
Cisneros, E., Kis-Katos, K., Nuryartono, N., 2021. Palm Oil and the Politics of Deforestation in Indonesia. Journal of
           Environmental Economics and Management 108
Cochrane, L., Hadis, S., 2019. Functionality of the Land Certification Program in Ethiopia: Exploratory Evaluation of the
           Processes of Updating Certificates. Land 8
Collier, P., 2017. African Urbanization: An Analytic Policy Guide. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 33, 405-437
Collier, P., Glaeser, E., Venables, A.J., Manwaring, P., Blake, M., 2017. Land and property taxes for municipal finance.
           International Growth Center, London
Collier, P., Venables, A.J., 2012. Land Deals in Africa: Pioneers and Speculators. Journal of Globalization and Development 3
Collins, W.J., Shester, K.L., 2013. Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal in the United States. American Economic Journal:
           Applied Economics 5, 239-273
Conte, B., 2021. Climate change and migration: the case of Africa. University of Barcelona, Barcelona
Conte, B., Desmet, K., Nagy, D.K., Rossi-Hansberg, E., 2021. Local sectoral specialization in a warming world. Journal of
           Economic Geography 21, 493-530
Costas-Fernandez, J., Guerra, J.-A., Mohnen, M., 2022. Train to Opportunity: The Effect of Infrastructure on Intergenerational
           Mobility∗. University College London, London
Cotula, L., 2014. Testing Claims about Large Land Deals in Africa: Findings from a Multi-country Study. Journal of
           Development Studies 50, 903-925
Coulomb, R., Zylberberg, Y., 2021. Environmental Risk and the Anchoring Role of Mobility Rigidities. Journal of the
           Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 8, 509-542
Coury, M., Kitagawa, T., Shertzer, A., Turner, M., 2021. The Value of Piped Water and Sewers: Evidence from 19th Century
           Chicago. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 29718, Cambridge, MA
Cust, J., Harding, T., 2020. Institutions and the Location of Oil Exploration. Journal of the European Economic Association 18,
           1321-1350
d'Arcy, M., Nistotskaya, M., Olsson, O., 2021. Land Property Rights, Cadasters and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Panel
           1000-2015 CE. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg



                                                                 37
Dachis, B., Duranton, G., Turner, M.A., 2012. The Effects of Land Transfer Taxes on Real Estate Markets: Evidence from a
          Natural Experiment in Toronto. Journal of Economic Geography 12, 327-354
de Janvry, A., Emerick, K., Gonzalez-Navarro, M., Sadoulet, E., 2015. Delinking Land Rights from Land Use: Certification and
          Migration in Mexico. American Economic Review 105, 3125-49
de Kadt, D., Larreguy, H.A., 2018. Agents of the Regime? Traditional Leaders and Electoral Politics in South Africa. The Journal
          of Politics 80, 382-399
De Meza, D., Gould, J., 1992. The Social Efficiency of Private Decisions to Enforce Property Rights. Journal of Political
          Economy 100, 561-580
de Soto, H., 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere else. New York: Basic
          Books.
Deininger, K., Ali, D.A., 2008. Do overlapping property rights reduce agricultural investment? Evidence from Uganda. American
          Journal of Agricultural Economics 90, 869-882
Deininger, K., Ali, D.A., Alemu, T., 2011. Impacts of Land Certification on Tenure Security, Investment, and Land Market
          Participation: Evidence from Ethiopia. Land Economics 87, 312-334
Deininger, K., Ali, D.A., Holden, S., Zevenbergen, J., 2008. Rural Land Certification in Ethiopia: Process, Initial Impact, and
          Implications for Other African Countries. World Development 36, 1786-1812
Deininger, K., Ali, D.A., Neyter, R., 2022a. Impacts of Transparent Online Auctions on Public Land Lease Revenue: Evidence
          from Legal and Administrative Changes in Ukraine. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10201, Washington
          DC
Deininger, K., Ali, D.A., Neyter, R., 2022b. Impacts of transparent online auctions on public land lease revenue: Evidence from
          legal and administrative changes in Ukraine. World Bank Policy Research Paper, Washington DC
Deininger, K., Awasthi, R., McCluskey, W., 2020a. Property taxation for own-source revenue generation: Potential for new
          technology and an application to Nigeria The World Bank, Washington, DC.
Deininger, K., Byerlee, D., 2012. The rise of large farms in land abundant countries: Do they have a future? World Development
          40, 701-714
Deininger, K., Castagnini, R., 2006. Incidence and Impact of Land Conflict in Uganda. Journal of Economic Behavior &
          Organization 60, 321-345
Deininger, K., Goyal, A., 2012. Going digital: Credict effects of land registry computerization in India. Journal of Development
          Economics 99, 236-243
Deininger, K., Hoogeveen, H., Kinsey, B.H., 2004. Economic Benefits and Costs of Land Redistribution in Zimbabwe in the
          Early 1980s. World Development 32, 1697-1709
Deininger, K., Jin, S., 2006. Tenure Security and Land-Related Investment: Evidence from Ethiopia. European Economic Review
          50, 1245-1277
Deininger, K., Jin, S., 2009. Securing property rights in transition: Lessons from implementation of China's rural land contracting
          law. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 70, 22-38
Deininger, K., Jin, S., Liu, S., Shao, T., Xia, F., 2019a. Property Rights Reform to Support China's Rural–Urban Integration:
          Village-Level Evidence from the Chengdu Experiment. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 81, 1214-1251
Deininger, K., Jin, S., Liu, S., Xia, F., 2020b. Property rights reform to support China’s rural - urban integration: household-level
          evidence from the Chengdu experiment. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 64, 30-54
Deininger, K., Jin, S., Liu, Y., Singh, S.K., 2018. Can Labor-Market Imperfections Explain Changes in the Inverse Farm Size-
          Productivity Relationship? Longitudinal Evidence from Rural India. Land Economics 94, 239-258
Deininger, K., Jin, S., Yadav, V., 2013. Does Sharecropping Affect Long-Term Investment? Evidence from West Bengal's
          Tenancy Reforms. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 95, 772-790
Deininger, K., Savastano, S., Xia, F., 2017. Smallholders' Land Access in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Landscape? Food Policy
          67, 78-92
Deininger, K., Xia, F., 2016. Quantifying Spillover Effects from Large Land-based Investment: The Case of Mozambique. World
          Development 87, 227-241
Deininger, K., Xia, F., Holden, S., 2019b. Gendered Incidence and Impacts of Tenure Insecurity on Agricultural Performance in
          Malawi’s Customary Tenure System. The Journal of Development Studies 55, 597 -619
Deininger, K., Xia, F., Kilic, T., Moylan, H., 2021. Investment impacts of gendered land rights in customary tenure systems:
          Substantive and methodological insights from Malawi. World Development 147, 105654
delCarpio, L., 2015. Are the neighbors cheating? Evidence from a social norm experiment on property taxes in Peru. Princeton,
          NY
Delpierre, M., Guirkinger, C., Platteau, J.-P., 2019. Risk as Impediment to Privatization? The Role of Collective Fields in
          Extended Agricultural Households. Economic Development and Cultural Change 67, 863-905
Di Falco, S., Laurent-Lucchetti, J., Veronesi, M., Kohlin, G., 2020. Property Rights, Land Disputes and Water Scarcity:
          Empirical Evidence from Ethiopia. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 102, 54-71
Di Tella, R., Galiani, S., Schargrodsky, E., 2007. The Formation of Beliefs: Evidence from the Allocation of Land Titles to
          Squatters. Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, 209-241
Dieterle, C., 2021. Global Governance Meets Local Land Tenure: International Codes of Conduct for Responsible Land
          Investments in Uganda. The Journal of Development Studies, 1-17



                                                                 38
Dillon, B., Brummund, P., Mwabu, G., 2019. Asymmetric Non-separation and Rural Labor Markets. Journal of Development
           Economics 139, 78-96
Dillon, B., Voena, A., 2018. Widows' Land Rights and Agricultural Investment. Journal of Development Economics 135, 449-
           460
Dippel, C., Frye, D., Leonard, B., 2020. Property Rights without Transfer Rights: A Study of Indian Land Allotment. National
           Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 27479
Djezou, W., 2016. Land Tenure Security and Deforestation: A Case Study of Forest Land Conversion to Perennial Crops in Cote
           d'Ivoire. Economics Bulletin 36, 173-186
Doblas, J., Reis, M.S., Belluzzo, A.P., Quadros, C.B., Moraes, D.R.V., Almeida, C.A., Maurano, L.E.P., Carvalho, A.F.A.,
           Sant’Anna, S.J.S., Shimabukuro, Y.E., 2022. DETER-R: An Operational Near-Real Time Tropical Forest Disturbance
           Warning System Based on Sentinel-1 Time Series Analysis. Remote Sensing 14, 3658
Dower, P.C., Pfutze, T., 2013. Specificity of Control: The Case of Mexico's Ejido Reform. Journal of Economic Behavior and
           Organization 91, 13-33
Du, R., Zheng, S., 2020. Agglomeration, housing affordability, and new firm formation: The role of subway network. Journal of
           Housing Economics 48, 101668
Dubbert, C., 2019. Participation in Contract Farming and Farm Performance: Insights from Cashew Farmers in Ghana.
           Agricultural Economics 50, 749-763
Duranton, G., Puga, D., 2020. The Economics of Urban Density. Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, 3-26
Dzansi, J., Jensen, A., Lagakos, D., Telli, H., 2022. Technology and Local State Capacity: Evidence from Ghana. National
           Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 29923
Eberle, U.J., Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., 2020. Heat and Hate: Climate Security and Farmer-Herder Conflicts in Africa. C.E.P.R.
           Discussion Papers, CEPR Discussion Papers: 15542
Eck, K., 2014. The Law of the Land: Communal Conflict and Legal Authority. Journal of Peace Research 51, 441-454
Edwards, R.B., 2019a. Export agriculture and rural poverty: evidence from Indonesian palm oil. In: Working Paper, Hanover,
           NH
Edwards, R.B., 2019b. Spillovers from agricultural processing. In: Working Paper, Hanover, NH
Edwards, R.B., Falcon, W.P., Hadiwidjaja, G., Higgins, M.M., Naylor, R.L., Sumarto, S., 2021. Fight fire with finance: a
           randomizedfield experiment to curtail land-clearing fire in Indonesia Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Eerola, E., Harjunen, O., Lyytikainen, T., Saarimaa, T., 2021. Revisiting the Effects of Housing Transfer Taxes. Journal of Urban
           Economics 124
Eerola, E., Lyytikainen, T., 2015. On the Role of Public Price Information in Housing Markets. Regional Science and Urban
           Economics 53, 74-84
Ehwi, R.J., Morrison, N., Tyler, P., 2021. Gated Communities and Land Administration Challenges in Ghana: Reappraising the
           Reasons Why People Move into Gated Communities. Housing Studies 36, 307-335
Emran, M.S., Shilpi, F., 2020. Do Land Market Restrictions Hinder Structural Change in a Rural Economy? Evidence from Sri
           Lanka. Bangladesh Development Studies 43, 1-35
Englund, P., 2003. Taxing Residential Housing Capital. Urban Studies 40, 937-952
Engström, L., Hajdu, F., 2018. Conjuring ‘Win -World’ – Resilient Development Narratives in a Large-Scale Agro-Investment in
           Tanzania. The Journal of Development Studies 55, 1-20
Ermini, B., Santolini, R., 2017. Urban Sprawl and Property Tax of a City's Core and Suburbs: Evidence from Italy. Regional
           Studies 51, 1374-1386
Esch, T., Deininger, K., Jedwab, R., Palacios-Lopez, D., 2022. Built space, policy, and economic development: Insights from
           global 3D mapping In: World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, Washington DC
Eswaran, M., Kotwal, A., 1986. Access to Capital and Agrarian Production Organization. Economic Journal 96, 482-498
Fabbri, M., 2021. Property rights and prosocial behavior: Evidence from a land tenure reform implemented as randomized
           control-trial. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 188, 552-566
Fabbri, M., Dari-Mattiacci, G., 2021. The Virtuous Cycle of Property. The Review of Economics and Statistics 103, 413-427
Fagereng, A., Holm, M.B., Torstensen, K.N., 2020. Housing Wealth in Norway, 1993-2015. Journal of Economic and Social
           Measurement 45, 65-81
Fan, E., Yeh, S.j., 2019. Tenure Security and Long‐term Investment on Tenanted Land: Evidence from Colonial Taiwan. Pacific
           Economic Review 24, 570-587
Fenske, J., 2010. L'Etranger: Status, Property Rights, and Investment Incentives in Cote d'Ivoire. Land Economics 86, 621-644
Fenske, J., 2011. Land tenure and investment incentives: Evidence from West Africa. Journal of Development Economics 95,
           137-156
Fenske, J., 2014. Trees, Tenure and Conflict: Rubber in Colonial Benin. Journal of Development Economics 110, 226-238
Fergusson, L., Larreguy, H., Riaño, J.F., 2022. Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation
           Program in Mexico. The Economic Journal 132, 2815-2834
Ferraro, P.J., Agrawal, A., 2021. Synthesizing evidence in sustainability science through harmonized experiments: Community
           monitoring in common pool resources. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, e2106489118
Fetzer, T., Marden, S., 2017. Take What You Can: Property Rights, Contestability and Conflict. Economic Journal 127, 757-783
Field, E., 2007. Entitled to Work: Urban Property Rights and Labor Supply in Peru. Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, 1561-
           1602


                                                               39
Firmin-Sellers, K., 1995. The politics of property rights. American Political Science Review 89, 867
Foster, A.D., Rosenzweig, M.R., 2021. Are There Too Many Farms in the World? Labor Market Transaction Costs, Machine
           Capacities, and Optimal Farm Size. Journal of Political Economy 130, 636-680
Frank, E.G., Sudarshan, A., 2022. The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse : Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in
           India. University of Warwick, Department of Economics, The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS)
Frankema, E., van Waijenburg, M., 2013. Endogenous Colonial Institutions: Lessons from Fiscal Capacity Building in British
           and French Africa, 1880-1940. In: African Economic History Working Paper 11/2013, pp. 895-926. Lund University,
           Lund
Franzsen, R., McCluskey, W., 2017. Property Tax in Africa. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA.
Galiani, S., Gertler, P.J., Undurraga, R., 2021. Aspiration adaptation in resource-constrained environments. Journal of Urban
           Economics 123, 103326
Galiani, S., Gertler, P.J., Undurraga, R., Cooper, R., Martinez, S., Ross, A., 2017. Shelter from the Storm: Upgrading Housing
           Infrastructure in Latin American Slums. Journal of Urban Economics 98, 187-213
Galiani, S., Schargrodsky, E., 2016. The Deregularization of Land Titles. National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER
           Working Papers: 22482
García-Morán, A., Yates, J.S., 2022. In between rights and power: Women’s land rights and the gendered politics of land
           ownership, use, and management in Mexican ejidos. World Development 152, 105804
Gautam, M., Ahmed, M., 2019. Too Small to Be Beautiful? The Farm Size and Productivity Relationship in Bangladesh. Food
           Policy 84, 165-175
Gavian, S., Fafchamps, M., 1996. Land Tenure and Allocative Efficiency in Niger. American Journal of Agricultural Economics
           78, 460-471
Gechter, M., Tsivanidis, N., 2020. Spatial Spillovers from Urban Renewal: Evidence from the Mumbai Mills Redevelopment.
           University of California, Berkeley, CA
Gendron-Carrier, N., Gonzalez-Navarro, M., Polloni, S., Turner, M.A., 2022. Subways and Urban Air Pollution. American
           Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14, 164-196
Genicot, G., Hernandez-de-Benito, M., 2022. Women’s land rights and village institutions in Tanzania. World Development 153,
           105811
Gertler, P.J., Gonzalez-Navarro, M., Gracner, T., Rothenberg, A.D., 2022. Road Maintenance and Local Economic Development:
           Evidence from Indonesia’s Highways. University of California, Berkeley
Gevaert, C.M., Persello, C., Sliuzas, R., Vosselman, G., 2020. Monitoring household upgrading in unplanned settlements with
           unmanned aerial vehicles. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation 90, 102117
Ghebru, H., Girmachew, F., 2020. Direct and spillover effects of land rights formalization in Africa: A case study of the Second-
           Level Land Certification (SLLC) in Ethiopia. In: Working Paper. International Food Policy Research Institute,
           Washington DC
Giles, J., Mu, R., 2018. Village Political Economy, Land Tenure Insecurity, and the Rural to Urban Migration Decision:
           Evidence from China. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 100, 521-544
Glover, S., Jones, S., 2019. Can Commercial Farming Promote Rural Dynamism in Sub-Saharan Africa? Evidence from
           Mozambique. World Development 114, 110-121
Goldsmith-Pinkham, P., Gustafson, M.T., Lewis, R.C., Schwert, M., 2021. Sea Level Rise Exposure and Municipal Bond Yields
           Yale University, New Haven, CT
Goldstein, M., Houngbedji, K., Kondylis, F., O'Sullivan, M., Selod, H., 2018. Formalization without Certification? Experimental
           Evidence on Property Rights and Investment. Journal of Development Economics 132, 57-74
Goldstein, M., Udry, C., 2008. The Profits of Power: Land Rights and Agricultural Investment in Ghana. Journal of Political
           Economy 116, 980-1022
Gollin, D., Udry, C., 2020. Heterogeneity, Measurement Error, and Misallocation: Evidence from African Agriculture. Journal of
           Political Economy 129, 1-80
Gonzalez-Navarro, M., Quintana-Domeque, C., 2016. Paving Streets for the Poor: Experimental Analysis of Infrastructure
           Effects. Review of Economics and Statistics 98, 254-267
González-Pampillón, N., 2022. Spillover effects from new housing supply. Regional Science and Urban Economics 92, 103759
Goodfellow, T., Owen, O., 2020. Thick claims and thin rights: Taxation and the construction of analogue property rights in
           Lagos. Economy and Society 49, 406-432
Gorelick, N., Hancher, M., Dixon, M., Ilyushchenko, S., Thau, D., Moore, R., 2017. Google Earth Engine: Planetary-scale
           geospatial analysis for everyone. Remote Sensing of Environment 202, 18-27
Gottlieb, C., Grobovsek, J., 2019. Communal Land and Agricultural Productivity. Journal of Development Economics 138, 135-
           152
Green, E., Norberg, M., 2018. Traditional Landholding Certificates in Zambia: Preventing or Reinforcing Commodification and
           Inequality? Journal of Southern African Studies 44, 613-628
Greiner, C., 2017. Pastoralism and Land-Tenure Change in Kenya: The Failure of Customary Institutions. Development and
           Change 48, 78-97
Grover, R., Torhonen, M.-P., Munro-Faure, P., Anand, A., 2017. Achieving Successful Implementation of Value-Based Property
           Tax Reforms in Emerging European Economies. Journal of European Real Estate Research 10, 91-106



                                                               40
Guirkinger, C., Platteau, J.-P., 2014. The Effect of Land Scarcity on Farm Structure: Empirical Evidence from Mali. Economic
          Development and Cultural Change 62, 195-238
Gupta, A., Van Nieuwerburgh, S., Kontokosta, C., 2022. Take the Q train: Value capture of public infrastructure projects. Journal
          of Urban Economics 129, 103422
Gutierrez, I.A., Molina, O., 2020. Reverting to Informality: Unregistered Property Transactions and the Erosion of the Titling
          Reform in Peru. Economic Development & Cultural Change 69, 317-334
Han, L., Heblich, S., Timmins, C., Zylberberg, Y., 2021. Cool Cities: The Value of Urban Trees ∗.
Han, L., Ngai, R., Sheedy, K., 2022. To own or to rent? The effects of transaction taxes on housing markets. London School of
          Economics, London
Harari, M., 2019. Women's Inheritance Rights and Bargaining Power: Evidence from Kenya. Economic Development and
          Cultural Change 68, 189-238
Harari, M., La Ferrara, E., 2018. Conflict, Climate, and Cells: A Disaggregated Analysis. Review of Economics and Statistics
          100, 594-608
Harari, M., Wong, M., 2019. Slum Upgrading and Long-run Urban Development: Evidence from Indonesia University of
          Pennsylvania
Hartley, D., Mazumder, B., Rajan, A., Shi, Y., 2021. The Effects of the Great Migration on Urban Renewal. pp. 44-44. Federal
          Reserve Bank of Chicago, Working Paper Series: WP-2021-04
Hartley, J., Ma, L., Wachter, S., Zevelev, A.A., 2023. Do Foreign Buyer Taxes Affect House Prices? . Stanford University
Hawley, Z., Miranda, J.J., Sawyer, W.C., 2018. Land values, property rights, and home ownership: Implications for property
          taxation in Peru. Regional Science and Urban Economics 69, 38-47
Heilmayr, R., Echeverría, C., Lambin, E.F., 2020. Impacts of Chilean forest subsidies on forest cover, carbon and biodiversity.
          Nature Sustainability 3, 701-709
Helfand, S.M., Taylor, M.P.H., 2021. The Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity: Refocusing the Debate.
          Food Policy 99
Henderson, J.V., Regan, T., Venables, A.J., 2021. Building the City: From Slums to a Modern Metropolis. The Review of
          Economic Studies 88, 1157-1192
Henderson, J.V., Storeygard, A., Deichmann, U., 2017. Has Climate Change Driven Urbanization in Africa? Journal of
          Development Economics 124, 60-82
Henderson, J.V., Turner, M.A., 2020. Urbanization in the Developing World: Too Early or Too Slow? Journal of Economic
          Perspectives 34, 150-173
Henn, S.J., 2022. Complements or Substitutes? How Institutional Arrangements Bind Traditional Authorities and the State in
          Africa. American Political Science Review, 1-20
Hilber, C.A.L., Lyytikainen, T., 2017. Transfer Taxes and Household Mobility: Distortion on the Housing or Labor Market?
          Journal of Urban Economics 101, 57-73
Hilber, C.A.L., Vermeulen, W., 2016. The Impact of Supply Constraints on House Prices in England. Economic Journal 126,
          358-405
Hobijn, B., Schoellman, T., Vindas, A., 2018. Structural Transformation by Cohort. In: Working Paper. Arizona State University
Holden, S.T., Deininger, K., Ghebru, H., 2009. Impacts of Low-Cost Land Certification on Investment and Productivity.
          American Journal of Agricultural Economics 91, 359-373
Holden, S.T., Deininger, K., Ghebru, H., 2011. Tenure insecurity, gender, low-cost land certification and land rental market
          participation in Ethiopia. Journal of Development Studies 47, 31-47
Honig, L., 2021. The Power of the Pen: Informal Property Rights Documents in Zambia. African Affairs
Huggins, C., 2018. Land-Use Planning, Digital Technologies, and Environmental Conservation in Tanzania. Journal of
          Environment and Development 27, 210-235
Hunt, D., 2004. Unintended Consequences of Land Rights Reform: The Case of the 1998 Uganda Land Act. Development Policy
          Review 22, 173-191
Huntington, H., Shenoy, A., 2021. Does insecure land tenure deter investment? Evidence from a randomized controlled trial.
          Journal of Development Economics 150, 102632
Iscan, T.B., 2018. Redistributive Land Reform and Structural Change in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. American Journal of
          Agricultural Economics 100, 732-761
Jack, B.K., 2013. Private Information and the Allocation of Land Use Subsidies in Malawi. American Economic Journal: Applied
          Economics 5, 113-135
Jack, B.K., Jayachandran, S., Kala, N., Pande, R., 2022. Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop
          Residue Burning. National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 30690
Jacoby, H., Minten, B., 2007. Is land titling in Sub-Saharan Africa cost effective? Evidence from Madagascar. World Bank
          Economic Review 21, 461-485
Jayachandran, S., de Laat, J., Lambin, E.F., Stanton, C.Y., 2016. Cash for Carbon: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Payments
          for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Deforestation. National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers:
          22378
Jayne, T.S., Muyanga, M., Wineman, A., Ghebru, H., Stevens, C., Stickler, M., 2019. Are Medium-Scale Farms Driving
          Agricultural Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa? Agricultural Economics 50, 75-95



                                                               41
Jeon, Y.D., Kim, Y.Y., 2000. Land Reform, Income Redistribution, and Agricultural Production in Korea. Economic
           Development and Cultural Change 48, 253-268
Jin, S., Jayne, T.S., 2013. Land Rental Markets in Kenya: Implications for Efficiency, Equity, Household Income, and Poverty.
           Land Economics 89, 246-271
Johannesen, N., Langetieg, P., Reck, D., Risch, M., Slemrod, J., 2020. Taxing Hidden Wealth: The Consequences of US
           Enforcement Initiatives on Evasive Foreign Accounts. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 12, 312-346
Jordán, F., Heilmayr, R., 2022. Forestry plantations and the demise of rural livelihoods. University of California, Santa Barbara
Julien, J.C., Bravo-Ureta, B.E., Rada, N.E., 2019. Assessing farm performance by size in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. Food
           Policy 84, 153-164
Jung, S., Dyngeland, C., Rausch, L., Rasmussen, L.V., 2021. Brazilian Land Registry Impacts on Land Use Conversion.
           American Journal of Agricultural Economics n/a
Kahn, M.E., Sun, W., Wu, J., Zheng, S., 2021. Do Political Connections Help or Hinder Urban Economic Growth? Evidence
           from 1,400 Industrial Parks in China. Journal of Urban Economics 121
Kalkuhl, M., Edenhofer, O., 2017. Ramsey Meets Thunen: The Impact of Land Taxes on Economic Development and Land
           Conservation. International Tax and Public Finance 24, 350-380
Kalkuhl, M., Schwerhoff, G., Waha, K., 2020. Land tenure, climate and risk management. Ecological Economics 171, 106573
Kansanga, M.M., Luginaah, I., 2019. Agrarian Livelihoods under Siege: Carbon Forestry, Tenure Constraints and the Rise of
           Capitalist Forest Enclosures in Ghana. World Development 113, 131-142
Kinda, S.R., Kere, N.E., Yogo, T.U., Simpasa, M.A., 2022. Do land rushes really improve food security in Sub-Saharan Africa?
           Food Policy 113, 102285
Kironde, L., 2006. Issuing of residential licenses in unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Dar es Salaam
Kitamura, S., 2022. Tillers of Prosperity: Land Ownership, Reallocation, and Structural Transformation. Osaka University, Osaka
Klopp, J.M., 2000. Pilfering the pulic: The problem of land grabbing in conteporary Kenya. Africa Today 47, 7-26
Knebelman, J., 2021. The (Un)Hidden Wealth of the City: Property Taxation under Weak Enforcement in Senegal. Paris School
           of Economics, Paris
Knoll, K., Schularick, M., Steger, T., 2017. No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012. American Economic Review
           107, 331-353
Kosec, K., Ghebru, H., Holtemeyer, B., Mueller, V., Schmidt, E., 2018. The Effect of Land Access on Youth Employment and
           Migration Decisions: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 100, 931-954
Koster, H.R.A., Rouwendal, J., 2012. The Impact of Mixed Land Use on Residential Property Values. Journal of Regional
           Science 52, 733-761
Kraus, S., Heilmayr, R., Koch, N., 2021. Spillovers to manufacturing plants from multi-million dollar plantations: evidence from
           the Indonesian palm oil boom. Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin
Kresch, E.P., Walker, M., Best, M.C., Gerard, F., Naritomi, J., 2023. Sanitation and property tax compliance: Analyzing the
           social contract in Brazil. Journal of Development Economics 160, 102954
Kuiiper, M., Kaathman, R., 2015. Property valuation and taxation in the Netherlands. Land Tenure Journal 15, 47-62
Kumar, N., Quisumbing, A.R., 2015. Policy Reform toward Gender Equality in Ethiopia: Little by Little the Egg Begins to Walk.
           World Development 67, 406-423
Kumar, T., 2021. The housing quality, income, and human capital effects of subsidized homes in urban India. Journal of
           Development Economics 153, 102738
Kusiluka, M.M., Chiwambo, D.M., 2019. Acceptability of residential licences as quasi-land ownership documents: Evidence
           from Tanzania. Land Use Policy 85, 176-182
Lagakos, D., Marshall, S., Mobarak, A.M., Vernot, C., Waugh, M.E., 2020. Migration Costs and Observational Returns to
           Migration in the Developing World. Journal of Monetary Economics 113, 138-154
Lall, S.V., 2017. Renewing Expectations about Africa's Cities. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 33, 521-539
Lanz, K., Gerber, J.-D., Haller, T., 2018. Land Grabbing, the State and Chiefs: The Politics of Extending Commercial Agriculture
           in Ghana. Development and Change 49, 1526-1552
Lavers, T., 2016. Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: Undermining National Sovereignty or Tool for State Building?
           Development and Change 47, 1078-1101
Lawin, K.G., Tamini, L.D., 2019. Land Tenure Differences and Adoption of Agri-environmental Practices: Evidence from Benin.
           Journal of Development Studies 55, 177-190
Lawley, C., 2018. Ownership Restrictions and Farmland Values: Evidence from the 2003 Saskatchewan Farm Security Act
           Amendment. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 100, 311-337
Lay, J., Nolte, K., Sipangule, K., 2020. Large-scale farms in Zambia: Locational patterns and spillovers to smallholder
           agriculture. World Development, 105277
Leeson, P.T., Harris, C., 2018. Wealth-Destroying Private Property Rights. World Development 107, 1-9
Lentz, C., 2010. Land Inalienable? Historical and Current Debates on Land Transfers in Northern Ghana. Africa 80, 56-80
Leonard, B., Parker, D.P., 2021. Fragmented Ownership and Natural Resource Use: Evidence from the Bakken. The Economic
           Journal 131, 1215-1249
Lewis, D.J., Polasky, S., 2018. An Auction Mechanism for the Optimal Provision of Ecosystem Services under Climate Change.
           Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 92, 20-34



                                                               42
Li, T.M., Semedi, P., 2021. Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone. Duke University Press, Durham
          and London.
Libecap, G.D., Lueck, D., 2011. The Demarcation of Land and the Role of Coordinating Property Institutions. Journal of Political
          Economy 119, 426-467
Linkow, B., 2016. Causes and Consequences of Perceived Land Tenure Insecurity: Survey Evidence from Burkina Faso. Land
          Economics 92, 308-327
Liu, Y., Barrett, C.B., Pham, T., Violette, W., 2020. The intertemporal evolution of agriculture and labor over a rapid structural
          transformation: Lessons from Vietnam. Food Policy 94
Loumeau, G., 2022. Land Consolidation Reforms: A Natural Experiment on the Economic and Political Effects of Agricultural
          Mechanization In: Cener of Economic Researchat ETH Zurich Working Paper 22/376, Zurich
Lowes, S., Montero, E., 2020. Concessions, Violence, and Indirect Rule: Evidence from the Congo Free State. University of
          California, San Diego
Lozano-Gracia, N., Young, C., Lall, S.V., Vishwanath, T., 2013. Leveraging land to enable urban transformation: lessons from
          global experience. The World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper Series: 6312
Maganga, F.P., Askew, K., Odgaard, R., Stein, H., 2016. Dispossession through Formalization: Tanzania and the G8 Land
          Agenda in Africa. Asian Journal of African Studies 40, 3-49
Manara, M., 2022. From Policy to Institution: Implementing Land Reform in Dar es Salaam's Unplanned Settlements.
          Environment and Planning A 54, 1368-1390
Manara, M., Regan, T., 2021. Eliciting demand for a publicly provided good from community leaders: Evidence from an RCT
          with title deeds in urban Tanzania. University of Oxford, Oxford
Marx, B., Stoker, T., Suri, T., 2013. The Economics of Slums in the Developing World. Journal of Economic Perspectives 27,
          187-210
Marx, B., Stoker, T.M., Suri, T., 2019. There Is No Free House: Ethnic Patronage in a Kenyan Slum†. American Econ omic
          Journal: Applied Economics 11, 36-70
Masiza, W., Chirima, J.G., Hamandawana, H., Kalumba, A.M., Magagula, H.B., 2022. A Proposed Satellite-Based Crop
          Insurance System for Smallholder Maize Farming. Remote Sensing 14, 1512
Maue, C.C., Burke, M., Emerick, K.J., 2020. Productivity Dispersion and Persistence Among the World's Most Numerous Firms.
          National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 26924
Maurer, N., Iyer, L., 2008. The cost of property rights: Establishing Institutions on the Philippine Frontier under American Rule,
          1898-1918. In: Working Paper 14298, Cambridge, MA
McCluskey, W., Franzsen, R., Kabinga, M., Kasese, C., 2018. The Role of Information Communication Technology to Enhance
          Property Tax Revenue in Africa: A Tale of Four Cities in Three Countries. In: ICTD Working Paper 88 Initiative APT
          (Ed.). International Centre for Tax and Development, Brighton
McGuirk, E., Burke, M., 2020. The Economic Origins of Conflict in Africa. Journal of Political Economy 128, 3940-3997
McGuirk, E.F., Nunn, N., 2020. Nomadic Pastoralism, Climate Change, and Conflict in Africa. National Bureau of Economic
          Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 28243
McPeak, J.G., Little, P.D., 2018. Mobile Peoples, Contested Borders: Land Use Conflicts and Resolution Mechanisms among
          Borana and Guji Communities, Southern Ethiopia. World Development 103, 119-132
Mekking, S., Kougblenou, D.V., Kossou, F.G., 2021. Fit-For-Purpose Upscaling Land Administration—A Case Study from
          Benin. Land 10
Melesse, M.B., Bulte, E., 2015. Does Land Registration and Certification Boost Farm Productivity? Evidence from Ethiopia.
          Agricultural Economics 46, 757-768
Melesse, M.B., Dabissa, A., Bulte, E., 2018. Joint Land Certification Programmes and Women's Empowerment: Evidence from
          Ethiopia. Journal of Development Studies 54, 1756-1774
Menon, N., van der Meulen Rodgers, Y., Kennedy, A.R., 2017. Land Reform and Welfare in Vietnam: Why Gender of the Land-
          Rights Holder Matters. Journal of International Development 29, 454-472
Merfeld, J., 2020. Labor Elasticities, Market Failures, and Misallocation: Evidence from Indian Agriculture. IZA Discussion
          Paper, 13682, Seoul, Korea
Mezgebo, T.G., Porter, C., 2020. From Rural to Urban, but Not through Migration: Household Livelihood Responses to Urban
          Reclassification in Northern Ethiopia. Journal of African Economies 29, 173-191
Michaels, G., Nigmatulina, D., Rauch, F., Regan, T., Baruah, N., Dahlstrand, A., 2021. Planning Ahead for Better
          Neighborhoods: Long-Run Evidence from Tanzania. Journal of Political Economy 129, 2112-2156
Mihaylova, I., 2023. Perpetuating the malign legacy of colonialism? Traditional chiefs’ power and deforestation in Sierra Leo ne.
          World Development 164, 106176
Monge-Naranjo, A., 2019. Markets, Externalities, and the Dynamic Gains of Openness. International Economic Review 60,
          1131-1170
Moritz, M., 2008. Competing Paradigms in Pastoral Development? A Perspective from the Far North of Cameroon. World
          Development 36, 2243-2254
Muchomba, F.M., 2017. Women’s Land Tenure Security and Household Human Capital: Evidence from Ethiopia’s Land
          Certification. World Development 98, 310-324
Muyanga, M., Jayne, T.S., 2019. Revisiting the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship Based on a Relatively Wide Range of Farm
          Sizes: Evidence from Kenya. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 101, 1140-1163


                                                               43
Nakamura, S., Avner, P., 2021. Spatial distributions of job accessibility, housing rents, and poverty: The case of Nairobi. Journal
           of Housing Economics 51, 101743
Nakamura, S., Peiser, R., Torto, R., 2018. Are There Investment Premiums for Mixed-Use Properties? Journal of Real Estate
           Research 40, 1-39
Nanhthavong, V., Bieri, S., Nguyen, A.-T., Hett, C., Epprecht, M., 2022. Proletarianization and gateways to precarization in the
           context of land-based investments for agricultural commercialization in Lao PDR. World Development 155, 105885
Nanhthavong, V., Epprecht, M., Hett, C., Zaehringer, J.G., Messerli, P., 2020. Poverty trends in villages affected by land-based
           investments in rural Laos. Applied Geography 124, 102298
Nath, I.B., 2020. The Food Problem and the Aggregate Productivity Consequences of Climate Change. National Bureau of
           Economic Research, Inc, NBER Working Papers: 27297
Neef, T., Nicolaides, P., Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Zucman, G., 2022. Effective sanctions against oligarchs and the role of a
           European Asset Registry EU Tax Observatory and World Inequality Lab, Paris
Niu, D., Sun, W., Zheng, S., 2021. The role of informal housing in lowering China’s urbanization costs. Regional Science and
           Urban Economics, 103638
Nkurunziza, 2015. Implementing and sustaining land tenure regularization in Rwanda. In: Hilhorst T & Meunier F (eds.) How
           Innovations in Land Administration Reform Improve on ‘Doing Business’ World Bank, Washington DC, pp. 10 -20.
Nolte, C., 2020. High-resolution land value maps reveal underestimation of conservation costs in the United States. Proceedings
           of the National Academy of Sciences 117, 29577-29583
Nolte, K., Voget-Kleschin, L., 2014. Consultation in Large-Scale Land Acquisitions: An Evaluation of Three Cases in Mali.
           World Development 64, 654-668
Norregaard, J., 2013. Taxing Immovable Property Revenue Potential and Implementation Challenges. pp. 43-43. International
           Monetary Fund, IMF Working Papers: 13/129
Nugent, J.B., Sanchez, N., 1998. Common Property Rights as an Endogenous Response to Risk. American Journal of
           Agricultural Economics 80, 651-657
Oates, W.E., Schwab, R.M., 1997. The Impact of Urban Land Taxation: The Pittsburgh Experience. National Tax Journal 50, 1-
           21
Obala, L.M., Mattingly, M., 2014. Ethnicity, Corruption and Violence in Urban Land Conflict in Kenya. Urban Studies 51, 2735-
           2751
Obeng-Odoom, F., 2014. Urban Land Policies in Ghana: A Case of the Emperor's New Clothes? Review of Black Political
           Economy 41, 119-143
Omotilewa, O.J., Jayne, T.S., Muyanga, M., Aromolaran, A.B., Liverpool-Tasie, L.S.O., Awokuse, T., 2021. A revisit of farm
           size and productivity: Empirical evidence from a wide range of farm sizes in Nigeria. World Development 146, 105592
Pailler, S., 2018. Re-election Incentives and Deforestation Cycles in the Brazilian Amazon. Journal of Environmental Economics
           and Management 88, 345-365
Peña, X., Vélez, M.A., Cárdenas, J.C., Perdomo, N., Matajira, C., 2017. Collective Property Leads to Household Investments:
           Lessons From Land Titling in Afro-Colombian Communities. World Development 97, 27-48
Peralta Quiros, T., Kerzhner, T., Avner, P., 2019. Exploring Accessibility to Employment Opportunities in African Cities : A
           First Benchmark. The World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper Series: 8971
Pinchbeck, E.W., Roth, S., Szumilo, N., Vanino, E., 2020. The Price of Indoor Air Pollution: Evidence from Radon Maps and the
           Housing Market. In: IZA DP No. 13655, Bonn
Pinckney, T.C., Kimuyu, P.K., 1994. Land Tenure Reform in East Africa: Good, Bad or Unimportant? Journal of African
           Economies 3, 1-28
Platteau, J.-P., 2000. Allocating and Enforcing Property Rights in Land: Informal versus Formal Mechanisms in Subsaharan
           Africa. Nordic Journal of Political Economy 26, 55-81
Pomponi, F., Saint, R., Arehart, J.H., Gharavi, N., D’Amico, B., 2021. Decoupling density from tallness in analysing the life
           cycle greenhouse gas emissions of cities. npj Urban Sustainability 1, 33
Porzio, T., Rossi, F., Santangelo, G., 2022. The Human Side of Structural Transformation. American Economic Review 112,
           2774-2814
Quan, J., Monteiro, J., Mole, P., 2013. The experience of Mozambique’s Community Land Initiative (itc) in securing land right s
           and improving community land use: Practice, policy and governance implications. In: Paper presented at the 2013
           Annual Bank Conference on Land and Poverty World Bank, Washington DC
Ramírez-Álvarez, A.A., 2019. Land titling and its effect on the allocation of public goods: Evidence from Mexico. World
           Development 124, 104660
Regan, T., Manwaring, P., 2023. Public Disclosure and Tax Compliance. Georgetown University, Washington DC
Resch, E., Bohne, R.A., Kvamsdal, T., Lohne, J., 2016. Impact of Urban Density and Building Height on Energy Use in Cities.
           Energy Procedia 96, 800-814
Restuccia, D., 2021. From Micro to Macro: Land Institutions, Agricultural Productivity, and Structural Transformation. In:
           Policy Research Working Paper. World Bank, Washington
Restuccia, D., Rogerson, R., 2017. The Causes and Costs of Misallocation. Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, 151-174
Ricker-Gilbert, J., Chamberlin, J., 2018. Transaction Costs, Land Rental Markets, and Their Impact on Youth Access to
           Agriculture in Tanzania. 94, 541-555



                                                                44
Ricker-Gilbert, J., Chamberlin, J., Kanyamuka, J., Jumbe, C.B.L., Lunduka, R., Kaiyatsa, S., 2019. How Do Informal Farmland
           Rental Markets Affect Smallholders' Well-Being? Evidence from a Matched Tenant-Landlord Survey in Malawi.
           Agricultural Economics 50, 595-613
Roche, M.P., 2020. Taking Innovation to the Streets: Microgeography, Physical Structure, and Innovation. Review of Economics
           and Statistics 102, 912-928
Rogers, S., Wilmsen, B., Han, X., Wang, Z.J.-H., Duan, Y., He, J., 2021. Scaling Up Agriculture? The Dynamics of Land
           Transfer in Inland China. World Development 146
Rosenthal, S.S., Strange, W.C., 2020. How Close Is Close? The Spatial Reach of Agglomeration Economies. Journal of
           Economic Perspectives 34, 27-49
Rosenthal, S.S., Strange, W.C., Urrego, J.A., 2022. JUE insight: Are city centers losing their appeal? Commercial real estate,
           urban spatial structure, and COVID-19. Journal of Urban Economics 127, 103381
Schafer, H.-B., Singh, R., 2018. Takings of Land by Self-Interested Governments: Economic Analysis of Eminent Domain.
           Journal of Law and Economics 61, 427-459
Schmalz, M.C., Sraer, D.A., Thesmar, D., 2017. Housing Collateral and Entrepreneurship. Journal of Finance (John Wiley &
           Sons, Inc.) 72, 99-132
Schoneveld, G.C., 2022. Transforming food systems through inclusive agribusiness. World Development 158, 105970
Schwerhoff, G., Edenhofer, O., Fleurbaey, M., 2020. Taxation of Economic Rents. Journal of Economic Surveys 34, 398-423
Segú, M., 2020. The impact of taxing vacancy on housing markets: Evidence from France. Journal of Public Economics 185,
           104079
Severen, C., Plantinga, A.J., 2018. Land-use regulations, property values, and rents: Decomposing the effects of the California
           Coastal Act. Journal of Urban Economics 107, 65-78
Sha, W., 2022. The political impacts of land expropriation in China. Journal of Development Economics, 102985
Shah, N., 2014. Squatting on Government Land. Journal of Regional Science 54, 114-136
Sheng, Y., Ding, J., Huang, J., 2019. The Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity in Agriculture: Evidence from Maize
           Production in Northern China. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 101, 790-806
Shete, M., Rutten, M., Schoneveld, G.C., Zewude, E., 2016. Land-Use Changes by Large-Scale Plantations and Their Effects on
           Soil Organic Carbon, Micronutrients and Bulk Density: Empirical Evidence from Ethiopia. Agriculture and Human
           Values 33, 689-704
Singh, R., 2019. Seismic risk and house prices: Evidence from earthquake fault zoning. Regional Science and Urban Economics
           75, 187-209
Slemrod, J., Ur Rehman, O., Waseem, M., 2022. How Do Taxpayers Respond to Public Disclosure and Social Recognition
           Programs? Evidence from Pakistan. Review of Economics and Statistics 104, 116-132
Smolka, M., Biderman, C., 2012. Housing Informality: An Economist's Perspective on Urban Planning. In: Brooks N, Donaghy
           K & Knaap GJ (eds.) The Oxford Handbook on Urban Economics and Planning. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Song, Y., Zenou, Y., 2006. Property Tax and Urban Sprawl: Theory and Implications for US Cities. Journal of Urban Economics
           60, 519-534
Southall, R., 2005. The Ndungu Report: Land & Graft in Kenya. Review of African Political Economy 32, 142-151
Stein, H., Maganga, F.P., Odgaard, R., Askew, K., Cunningham, S., 2016. The Formal Divide: Customary Rights and the
           Allocation of Credit to Agriculture in Tanzania. Journal of Development Studies 52, 1306-1319
Sulle, E., 2020. Bureaucrats, investors and smallholders: contesting land rights and agro-commercialisation in the Southern
           agricultural growth corridor of Tanzania. Journal of Eastern African Studies 14, 332-353
Szerman, D., Assunção, J., Lipscomb, M., Mobarak, A.M., 2022. Agricultural Productivity and Deforestation Evidence from
           Brazil
Tang, C.K., 2021. The Cost of Traffic: Evidence from the London Congestion Charge. Journal of Urban Economics 121, 103302
Teklu, T., Lemi, A., 2004. Factors Affecting Entry and Intensity in Informal Rental Land Markets in Southern Ethiopian
           Highlands. Agricultural Economics 30, 117-128
Tellman, B., Eakin, H., Janssen, M.A., de Alba, F., Turner Ii, B.L., 2021. The role of institutional entrepreneurs and informal
           land transactions in Mexico City’s urban expansion. World Development 140, 105374
Tourek, G., Balan, P., Bergeron, A., Weigel, J., 2020. Local elites as state capacity: How city chiefs use local information to
           increase tax compliance in the DR Congo. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Tsivanidis, N., 2021. Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogotá’s TransMilenio. University of
           California, Berkeley
Valsecchi, M., 2014. Land Property Rights and International Migration: Evidence from Mexico. Journal of Development
           Economics 110, 276-290
Van den Broeck, G., Swinnen, J., Maertens, M., 2017. Global Value Chains, Large-Scale Farming, and Poverty: Long-Term
           Effects in Senegal. Food Policy 66, 97-107
van der Zon, M., de Jong, W., Arts, B., 2023. Community enforcement and tenure security: A fuzzy-set qualitative Comparative
           analysis of twelve community forest management initiatives in the Peruvian Amazon. World Development 161, 106071
Vélez, M.A., Robalino, J., Cardenas, J.C., Paz, A., Pacay, E., 2020. Is collective titling enough to protect forests? Evidence from
           Afro-descendant communities in the Colombian Pacific region. World Development 128, 104837
Venables, A.J., 2017. Breaking into tradables: Urban form and urban function in a developing city. Journal of Urban Economics
           98, 88-97


                                                                45
Wang, S.-Y., 2012. Credit Constraints, Job Mobility, and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a Property Reform in China. Review
           of Economics and Statistics 94, 532-551
Wang, S.-Y., 2014. Property Rights and Intra-household Bargaining. Journal of Development Economics 107, 192-201
Weigel, J.L., 2020. The Participation Dividend of Taxation: How Citizens in Congo Engage More with the State When it Tries to
           Tax Them*. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, 1849-1903
Widengard, M., 2019. Land Deals, and How Not All States React the Same: Zambia and the Chinese Request. Review of African
           Political Economy 46, 615-631
Wineman, A., Jayne, T.S., 2021. Factor Market Activity and the Inverse Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in Tanzania.
           Journal of Development Studies 57, 443-464
Wineman, A., Liverpool-Tasie, L.S.O., 2017. Land Markets and Land Access among Female-Headed Households in
           Northwestern Tanzania. World Development 100, 108-122
Winters, M.S., Conroy-Krutz, J., 2021. Preferences for Traditional and Formal Sector Justice Institutions to Address Land
           Disputes in Rural Mali. World Development 142
Wren-Lewis, L., Becerra-Valbuena, L., Houngbedji, K., 2020. Formalizing land rights can reduce forest loss: Experimental
           evidence from Benin. Science Advances 6, eabb6914
Yao, Y., Jin, X., Cao, K., Zhao, M., Zhu, T., Zhang, J., Zeng, Y., 2021. Residential proximity to major roadways and cognitive
           function among Chinese adults 65 years and older. Science of The Total Environment 766, 142607
Zárate, R.D., 2022. Spatial Misallocation, Informality, and Transit Improvements: Evidence from Mexico City. University of
           California, Berkeley, CA
Zein, T., 2021. Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration In Ethiopia - Ten Years of Success. In: Paper presented at the FIG e-
           working week, June 21-25 2021. International Federation of Surveyors
Zevelev, A.A., 2021. Does Collateral Value Affect Asset Prices? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Texas. The Review of
           Financial Studies 34, 4373-4411
Zhao, X., 2020. Land and labor allocation under communal tenure: Theory and evidence from China. Journal of Development
           Economics 147, 102526
zu Ermgassen, E.K.H.J., Ayre, B., Godar, J., Bastos Lima, M.G., Bauch, S., Garrett, R., Green, J., Lathuillière, M.J., Löfgren, P.,
           MacFarquhar, C., Meyfroidt, P., Suavet, C., West, C., Gardner, T., 2020. Using supply chain data to monitor zero
           deforestation commitments: an assessment of progress in the Brazilian soy sector. Environmental Research Letters 15,
           035003




                                                                46