Publication: Land Institutions to Address New Challenges in Africa: Implications for the World Bank’s Land Policy
Loading...
Files in English
437 downloads
54 downloads
Date
2023-04-05
ISSN
Published
2023-04-05
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Although land and associated property is a key part of national wealth and protecting rights to it is a key function of the state, Africa’s formal land institutions often still operate on regulations that barely changed since colonial times, risking to undermine public trust and leading to high levels of informality that make it difficult to support vibrant urban land and financial markets, control corruption, improve rural factor market functioning to empower women, foster structural change, and ensure sustainable management of public land. If an appropriate regulatory framework is in place, digital technology provides opportunities for African countries to broaden the range of rights that can be legally recognized, expand the type of contracts involving such rights that private parties can enter, reduce associated enforcement costs, and provide local and global public goods. Institutions such as the World Bank can create momentum for reform through globally comparable monitoring and help harness these opportunities by focusing interventions on providing analytical support to establish the policy and institutional environment to (i) document and enforce rights at scale; (ii) regulate land markets to ensure competition and deliver public goods including price information, land use planning to coordinate investment and avoid externalities, and tax land value gains to support local public services; and (iii) reduce the transaction cost for private parties to enter and enforce contracts involving immovable property and the uses to which it is put.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Deininger, Klaus; Goyal, Aparajita. 2023. Land Institutions to Address New Challenges in Africa: Implications for the World Bank’s Land Policy. Policy Research Working Papers; 10389. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/39634 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Land Policies and Institutions for Equitable and Resilient Growth in Africa(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2025-01-24)In coming decades, Africa's urban populations will expand, and the effects of climate change be more keenly felt. Land policies and institutions will be key for urban dwellers to be able access productive jobs, breathe clean air, and live in decent housing; for entrepreneurs, especially women, to leverage land for productive investment; and for farmers to diversify, insure against shocks, and accumulate capital. Yet, many African land registries perform poorly, command little trust, and have failed to capitalize on opportunities to improve quality, relevance, and outreach via digital interoperability, use of earth observation, and connectivity. Literature highlights scope for regulatory and institutional reforms to (a) expand property taxation and land value capture and to improve urban service delivery, planning, and land use regulations; (b) increase quality and affordability of land services and access to land price and ownership data; (c) guide issuance of rural land use rights to reduce barriers to rural factor markets, including by spatially enabling farmer registries to improve subsidy targeting and effectiveness; and (d) demarcation and transparent decentralized management of public land to attract investment, including in climate finance, without fueling corruption, and to manage disputes before they escalate into ethnic violence.Publication Land Policies for Resilient and Equitable Growth in Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-22)Land institutions and policies will be critical to help African countries respond to the challenges of climate change, urban expansion, structural transformation, and gender equality. Together, they affect urban dwellers’ ability to access productive jobs, live in decent housing, and breathe clean air; farmers’ and women entrepreneurs’ capacity to insure against shocks, increase productivity, and diversify income sources; and governments’ ability to plan, tax property to provide services, and manage public land in a way that provides sustained local benefits by attracting investment, including via climate finance. "Land Policies for Resilient and Equitable Growth in Africa" draws on a wealth of data, examples, and studies from Africa and beyond to show that regulatory and institutional reforms can harness this potential by improving quality, coverage, usefulness, and sustainability of documented land rights. By identifying viable reforms with transformative potential that fully harness digital opportunities, this book provides practical guidance to governments seeking to enhance their land institutions’ performance; to their partners supporting such reform; and to policymakers, land professionals, scholars, and civil society aiming to lay the foundations for Africa to better utilize its economic, human, and ecological potential. "This volume provides an essential reference, based on an impressive review of the literature on land issues in Africa and an exhaustive account of policies and policy experiments aimed to promote the efficient use of this key resource for the development of the continent." — François Bourguignon, Professor Emeritus, Paris School of Economics "Many African governments will find this report highly useful. It is full of little-known successes and practical ways by which they can improve their land policies by harnessing new technologies. Africa’s urban population will rapidly triple: clarifying land rights is an urgent priority in building the successful cities of the future. By 2050, if the inherited policies of the past were retained, today’s youth would be struggling in unliveable mega-slums." — Sir Paul Collier, Professor of Economics & Public Policy, Oxford University "This is an excellent study that combines insights from years of research with practical insights for policy and action on the ground." — Jyotsna Puri, Associate Vice President, Strategy and Knowledge, International Fund for Agricultural Development "Land institutions affect the effective use of land but also the functioning of credit, labor, and product markets. Nowhere are these issues more relevant than in Africa, and this report is important and timely." — Johan Swinnen, Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute "This report illustrates how legal and institutional reforms that capitalize on digital opportunities can strengthen land institutions and policies to optimize land use, enhance people’s rights, narrow gender disparities, and catalyze structural transformation in a manner that aligns with the continent’s distinctive context and serve as a pivotal instrument for social and economic advancement." — Maximo Torero, Chief Economist, Food and Agriculture OrganizationPublication Going Digital : Credit Effects of Land Registry Computerization in India(2010-03-01)Despite strong beliefs that property titling and registration will enhance credit access, empirical evidence in support of such effects remains scant. The gradual roll-out of computerization of land registry systems across Andhra Pradesh's 387 sub-registry offices allows us to combine quarterly administrative data on credit disbursed by all commercial banks for an eleven-year period (1997-2007) aggregated to the sub-registry office level with the date of shifting registration from manual to digital. Computerization had no credit effect in rural areas but led to increased credit-supply in urban ones. A marked increase of registered urban mortgages due to computerization supports the robustness of the result. At the same time, estimated impacts from reduction of the stamp duty are much larger, suggesting that, without further changes in the property rights system, impacts of computerization will remain marginal.Publication Inheritance Law Reform and Women’s Access to Capital : Evidence from India’s Hindu Succession Act(2010-06-01)This paper examines whether and to what extent amendments in inheritance legislation impact women's physical and human capital investments, using disaggregated household level data from India. The authors use inheritance patterns over three generations of individuals to assess the impact of changes in the Hindu Succession Act that grant daughters equal coparcenary birth rights in joint family property that were denied to daughters in the past. The causal effect is isolated by exploiting the variation in the timing of father's death to compare within household bequests of land given to sons and daughters in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. The analysis shows that the amendment significantly increased daughters' likelihood to inherit land, but that even after the amendment substantial bias persists. The results also indicate a robust increase in educational attainment of daughters, suggesting an alternative channel of wealth transfer.Publication Does Title Increase Large Farm Productivity? Institutional Determinants of Large Land-Based Investments’ Performance in Zambia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)The importance of well-functioning land markets for structural transformation via labor movements to the non-agricultural sector, growth in farm size, and the ability to use land as collateral for credit and has long motivated Government efforts at reducing the transaction costs of registering and transferring land and supporting large farm formation. Rigorous evidence on the effect of such measures has, however, been scant. This paper explores the impact of institutional arrangements on productivity for a representative sample of 3,000 large farms in Zambia, one of the earliest African adopters of such policies to close this gap. Instrumental-variable (IV) regressions suggest title has no effect on productivity, investment, or credit access and reduces rather than improves rental market participation. Measures to harness Zambia’s potential include improving title quality through exclusive use of digital registries; imposition of a land tax on state land to incentivize productive rather than speculative land use and cancel outdated legacy documents; and greater involvement of traditional authorities in record maintenance and land management, possibly via land tax revenue sharing.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Poverty Reduction in Indonesia : Constructing a New Strategy(Washington, DC, 2001-10-29)The objective of the report is to point at the need for a new poverty strategy, and the areas of action it should cover, where each area should be specifically discussed, addressing the lives of Indonesia's poor, and the tradeoffs policymakers will need to consider, based on the belief that this poverty strategy should emerge from a broad dialogue among stakeholders. First, in broadening poverty, the report looks at the facts of the late 1990s crisis, which revealed the precariousness of Indonesia's gains in reducing expenditure-based poverty. Thus to extend those gains, the poverty strategy needs to be defined, and then redeveloped by acknowledging the multidimensional reality of poverty, and, it is this notion which will lead to making the strategic choices. Second, within the country's political transition to a democratic, decentralized mode of governance, a poverty strategy needs to be consistent with an empowered populace, and democratic policymaking mechanisms. In creating a policy environment for raising the incomes of the poor, the report identifies the resumption of rapid sustainable growth, with rising real wages, employment opportunities, and, limited inflation, including the economic empowerment of the poor, enhanced by poverty-focused public expenditures. Inevitably, the provision of core public services is an area which should address the people's will in local governance policies, focusing on education and health, while providing appropriate infrastructure, and developing safety nets.Publication Impact Evaluation in Practice, Second Edition(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank, 2016-09-13)The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policy makers and development practitioners. First published in 2011, it has been used widely across the development and academic communities. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of impact evaluations and the best ways to use them to design evidence-based policies and programs. The updated version covers the newest techniques for evaluating programs and includes state-of-the-art implementation advice, as well as an expanded set of examples and case studies that draw on recent development challenges. It also includes new material on research ethics and partnerships to conduct impact evaluation. The handbook is divided into four sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two presents the main impact evaluation methods; Part Three addresses how to manage impact evaluations; Part Four reviews impact evaluation sampling and data collection. Case studies illustrate different applications of impact evaluations. The book links to complementary instructional material available online, including an applied case as well as questions and answers. The updated second edition will be a valuable resource for the international development community, universities, and policy makers looking to build better evidence around what works in development.Publication World Development Report 2009(World Bank, 2009)Places do well when they promote transformations along the dimensions of economic geography: higher densities as cities grow; shorter distances as workers and businesses migrate closer to density; and fewer divisions as nations lower their economic borders and enter world markets to take advantage of scale and trade in specialized products. World Development Report 2009 concludes that the transformations along these three dimensions density, distance, and division are essential for development and should be encouraged. The conclusion is controversial. Slum-dwellers now number a billion, but the rush to cities continues. A billion people live in lagging areas of developing nations, remote from globalizations many benefits. And poverty and high mortality persist among the world’s bottom billion, trapped without access to global markets, even as others grow more prosperous and live ever longer lives. Concern for these three intersecting billions often comes with the prescription that growth must be spatially balanced. This report has a different message: economic growth will be unbalanced. To try to spread it out is to discourage it to fight prosperity, not poverty. But development can still be inclusive, even for people who start their lives distant from dense economic activity. For growth to be rapid and shared, governments must promote economic integration, the pivotal concept, as this report argues, in the policy debates on urbanization, territorial development, and regional integration. Instead, all three debates overemphasize place-based interventions. Reshaping Economic Geography reframes these debates to include all the instruments of integration spatially blind institutions, spatially connective infrastructure, and spatially targeted interventions. By calibrating the blend of these instruments, today’s developers can reshape their economic geography. If they do this well, their growth will still be unbalanced, but their development will be inclusive.Publication Boom, Bust and Up Again? Evolution, Drivers and Impact of Commodity Prices: Implications for Indonesia(World Bank, Jakarta, 2010-12)Indonesia is one of the largest commodity exporters in the world, and given its mineral potential and expected commodity price trends, it could and should expand its leading position. Commodities accounted for one fourth of Indonesia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and more than one fifth of total government revenue in 2007. The potential for further commodity growth is considerable. Indonesia is the largest producer of palm oil in the world (export earnings totaled almost US$9 billion in 2007 and employment 3.8 million full-time jobs) and the sector has good growth prospects. It is also one of the countries with the largest mining potential in view of its second-largest copper reserves and third-largest coal and nickel reserves in the world. This report consists of seven chapters. The first six chapters present an examination and an analysis of the factors driving increased commodity prices, price forecasts, economic impact of commodity price increases, effective price stabilization policies, and insights from Indonesia's past growth experience. The final chapter draws on the findings of the previous chapters and suggests a development strategy for Indonesia in the context of high commodity prices. This section summarizes the contents of the chapters and their main findings.Publication World Development Report 2004(World Bank, 2003)Too often, services fail poor people in access, in quality, and in affordability. But the fact that there are striking examples where basic services such as water, sanitation, health, education, and electricity do work for poor people means that governments and citizens can do a better job of providing them. Learning from success and understanding the sources of failure, this year’s World Development Report, argues that services can be improved by putting poor people at the center of service provision. How? By enabling the poor to monitor and discipline service providers, by amplifying their voice in policymaking, and by strengthening the incentives for providers to serve the poor. Freedom from illness and freedom from illiteracy are two of the most important ways poor people can escape from poverty. To achieve these goals, economic growth and financial resources are of course necessary, but they are not enough. The World Development Report provides a practical framework for making the services that contribute to human development work for poor people. With this framework, citizens, governments, and donors can take action and accelerate progress toward the common objective of poverty reduction, as specified in the Millennium Development Goals.