How to make land titling more rational

Benito Arruñada

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Substantial variety exists among systems of land and business formalization both over time and across countries. For instance, England relied on private titling and delayed land registration for centuries. In contrast, early on, its American colonies imported land recordation and its Australian colonies land registration. Similarly, in most of the world, governments used to allow voluntary land titling, in which owners decide whether they register their land. Recently, however, governments and international agencies have more often opted for universal titling, aiming to register all the land in a certain region. This paper critically examines these strategies, analyzing the costs and benefits of the two main decisions: whether to create a public titling system or to rely exclusively on private titling, and the choice between voluntary and universal titling. It concludes that universal titling is seldom optimal. In particular, it argues that lack of titling is more a consequence than a cause of poverty.

Keywords: Property rights; land policy; land titling; registries; transaction costs; impersonal exchange (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 G38 H41 K11 K12 L85 O17 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07, Revised 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1575.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How to Make Land Titling more Rational (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1575

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).