2 - Conceptualizing and Measuring the Property Rights Gap

Summary

This chapter conceptualizes, codes, and provides a visualization of property rights gaps. Land can be held by individuals, groups, and governments; ownership can be formalized or informal in various ways; and property rights can face a diverse array of restrictions. I home in on several critical components of property rights in constructing my property rights gap measures: land formalization, defensibility, and alienability. I use these aspects of property rights to construct measures of complete, partial, and absent property rights. Based on these definitions, this chapter outlines the original data, I collected on land reform and property rights through land titling in Latin America, and then visualizes the data used to construct measures of the property rights gap. The chapter situates the data and patterns relative to important forms of landholding such as collective and communal land rights, cooperatives, land that is nationalized, and individually held land. This chapter also discusses the evolution of land rights in Latin America from the colonial period to the early 1900s.