Person:
Selod, Harris
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Urban economics,
Transport,
Land markets,
Public Policy,
Agriculture and Rural Development
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Harris Selod is a Senior Economist with the Development Research Group of the World Bank in Washington, DC. His current research focuses on urban development, including issues related to transport and land use, as well as land tenure, land markets and the political economy of the land sector in developing countries, with a specific interest in West Africa. His publications cover a variety of topics in urban and public economics including theories of squatting and residential informality, the political economy of transport infrastructure, the effects of residential segregation on schooling and unemployment, or the impact of land rights formalization and place-based policies. Over the past years, he has held various positions within the World Bank, including as an invited Visiting Scholar, as a land policy expert seconded by the government of France, and as staff, and was the chair of the World Bank's Land Policy and Administration thematic group (2011-2013). Prior to joining the World Bank in 2007, he was a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research and an Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics (where he taught microeconomic theory and urban studies). He also taught economics at various other institutions in France, including the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE). He holds a PhD in Economics from Sorbonne University, a BSc/MSc in statistics from ENSAE, and a BBA/MBA from ESCP Europe.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 30
-
Publication
A Systemic Analysis of Land Markets and Land Institutions in West African Cities : Rules and Practices--The Case of Bamako, Mali
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-11)This paper presents a new type of land market analysis relevant to cities with plural tenure systems as in West Africa. The methodology hinges on a systemic analysis of land delivery channels, which helps to show how land is initially made available for circulation, how tenure can be formalized incrementally, and the different means whereby households can access land. The analysis is applied to the area of Bamako in Mali, where information was collected through (i) interviews with key informants, (ii) a literature review on land policies, public allocations, and customary transfers of land, (iii) a press review on land disputes, and (iv) a survey of more than 1,600 land transfers of un-built plots that occurred between 2009 and 2012. The analysis finds that land is mostly accessed through an informal customary channel, whereby peri-urban land is transformed from agricultural to residential use, and through a public channel, which involves the administrative allocation of residential plots to households. The integrated analysis of land markets and land institutions stresses the complexity of procedures and the extra-legality of practices that strongly affect the functioning of formal and informal markets and make access to land costly and insecure, with negative social, economic, and environmental impacts over the long term. -
Publication
Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries : A Survey of Theoretical Predictions and Empirical Findings
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-05)The migration of labor from rural to urban areas is an important part of the urbanization process in developing countries. Even though it has been the focus of abundant research over the past five decades, some key policy questions have not found clear answers yet. To what extent is internal migration a desirable phenomenon and under what circumstances? Should governments intervene and, if so, with what types of interventions? What should be their policy objectives? To shed light on these important issues, the authors survey the existing theoretical models and their conflicting policy implications and discuss the policies that may be justified based on recent relevant empirical studies. A key limitation is that much of the empirical literature does not provide structural tests of the theoretical models, but only provides partial findings that can support or invalidate intuitions and in that sense, support or invalidate the policy implications of the models. The authors' broad assessment of the literature is that migration can be beneficial or at least be turned into a beneficial phenomenon so that in general migration restrictions are not desirable. They also identify some data issues and research topics which merit further investigation. -
No Thumbnail AvailablePublication
A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries
( 2009)This paper offers a new theoretical approach to urban squatting, reflecting the view that squatters and formal residents compete for land within a city. The key implication is that squatters "squeeze" the formal market, raising the price paid by formal residents. The squatter organizer ensures that squeezing is not too severe, since otherwise, the formal price will rise to a level that invites eviction by landowners. Because eviction is absent in equilibrium, the model differs from previous analytical frameworks, where eviction occurs with some probability. It also facilitates a general equilibrium analysis of squatter formalization policies. -
Publication
The Land Governance Assessment Framework : Identifying and Monitoring Good Practice in the Land Sector
(World Bank, 2012)Seventy-five percent of the world's poor live in rural areas and most are involved in agriculture. In the 21st century, agriculture remains fundamental to economic growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental sustainability. The World Bank's Agriculture and rural development publication series presents recent analyses of issues that affect the role of agriculture, including livestock, fisheries, and forestry, as a source of economic development, rural livelihoods, and environmental services. The series is intended for practical application, and hope that it will serve to inform public discussion, policy formulation, and development planning. Increased global demand for land because of higher and more volatile food prices, urbanization, and use of land for environmental services implies an increased need for well-designed land policies at the country level to ensure security of long-held rights, to facilitate land access, and to deal with externalities. Establishing the infrastructure necessary to proactively deal with these challenges can require large amounts of resources. Yet with land tenure deeply rooted in any country's history, a wide continuum of land rights, and vast differences in the level of socioeconomic development, the benefits to be expected and the challenges faced will vary across and even within countries, implying a need to adapt the nature and sequencing of reforms to country circumstances. Also, as reforms will take time to bear fruit and may be opposed by vested interests, there is a need to identify challenges and to reach consensus on how to address them in a way that allows objective monitoring of progress over time. Without this being done, the chances of making quick progress in addressing key land policy challenges are likely to be much reduced. The Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) is intended as a first step to help countries deal with these issues. It is a diagnostic tool that is to be implemented at the local level in a collaborative fashion, that addresses the need for guidance to diagnose and benchmark land governance, and that can help countries prioritize reforms and monitor progress over time. -
Publication
Assessing Urban Policies Using a Simulation Model with Formal and Informal Housing: Application to Cape Town, South Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Building on a two-dimensional discrete version of the standard urban economics land-use model, this paper presents a tractable urban land-use simulation model that is adapted to developing country cities, where formal and informal housing submarkets coexist. The dynamic closed-city framework simulates developers' construction decisions and heterogeneous households' housing and location choices at a distance from various employment subcenters, while accounting at the same time for land-use regulations, natural constraints, exogenous amenities, and dynamic scenarios of urban population growth and of State-driven subsidized housing. Designed and calibrated for Cape Town, the model is used to assess the impact of an urban growth boundary and of changes in the scale of subsidized housing schemes, informing a discussion of the potential trade-offs in policy objectives and of policy effectiveness. -
Publication
Transport Policies and Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-07)This survey reviews the current state of the economic literature, assessing the impact of transport policies on growth, inclusion, and sustainability in a developing country context. The findings are summarized and methodologies are critically assessed, especially those dealing with endogeneity issues in empirical studies. The specific implementation challenges of transport policies in developing countries are discussed. -
Publication
Land Delivery Systems in West African Cities : The Example of Bamako, Mali: L’exemple de Bamako
(Washington, DC: World Bank; and Agence Française de Développement, 2015-03-18)Urban and peri-urban land markets in rapidly expanding West African cities operate within and across different coexisting tenure regimes and involve complex procedures to obtain or make land available for housing. Because a structured framework lacks for the analysis of such systems, this book proposes a systemic approach and applies it to Bamako and its surrounding areas. The framework revolves around the description of land delivery channels: starting from the status of tenure when the land is first placed in circulation for residential use, it identifies the processes whereby tenure can be improved, the types of transactions that take place along the way, and interactions between land delivery channels. -
Publication
Roads and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06)This paper assesses the relation between access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa. Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades (1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant positive association between increased market accessibility and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but significant increase in local gross domestic product. These results are suggestive of agricultural activities that develop at the extensive margin, which are mostly to serve local demand, but are not indicative of commercial agriculture that serves external markets. -
Publication
Urbanization and Property Rights
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11)Since the industrial revolution, the economic development of Western Europe and North America was characterized by continuous urbanization accompanied by a gradual phasing-in of urban land property rights over time. Today, however, the evidence in many fast urbanizing low-income countries points towards a different trend of “urbanization without formalization”, with potentially adverse effects on long-term economic growth. This paper aims to understand the causes and the consequences of this phenomenon, and whether informal city growth could be a transitory or a persistent feature of developing economies. A dynamic stochastic equilibrium model of a representative city is developed, which explicitly accounts for the joint dynamics of land property rights and urbanization. The calibrated baseline model describes a city that first grows informally, with the growth of individual incomes leading to a phased-in purchase of property rights in subsequent periods. The model demonstrates that land tenure informality does not necessarily vanish in the long term, and the social optimum does not necessarily imply a fully formal city, neither in the transition, nor in the long run. The welfare effects of policies, such as reducing the cost of land tenure formalization, or protecting informal dwellers against evictions are subsequently investigated, throughout the short-term transition and in the long-term stationary state. -
Publication
Formalization without Certification?: Experimental Evidence on Property Rights and Investment
(Elsevier, 2018-01-03)We present evidence from the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land formalization program. We examine the link between land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. The tenure security improvement through demarcation induces a 23 to 43 percent shift toward long-term investment on treated parcels. We explore gender and parcel location as relevant dimensions of heterogeneity. We find that female-managed landholdings in treated villages are more likely to be left fallow—an important soil fertility investment. Women respond to an exogenous tenure security change by shifting investment away from relatively secure, demarcated land and toward less secure land outside the village to guard those parcels.