5 - Consequences of the Property Rights Gap

Summary

When rural populations hold land without property rights, this has important and wide-ranging economic, social, and political consequences. Property rights gaps keeps land reform beneficiaries dispersed across the countryside working in agriculture, slowing urbanization. Property rights gaps distort incentives to invest in improvements and inputs due to land tenure insecurity and a lack of access to credit, slowing growth in agricultural productivity. And property rights gaps are linked to urban policy bias by disadvantaging rural dwellers from accessing the same basic services such as education and opportunities for employment by the state that urban dwellers enjoy. These dynamics fuel economic inequality and they sow the seeds of underdevelopment and slow economic growth. Property rights gaps also have direct political consequences that shape the nature of access to power, the ability to translate preferences into policy, and contestation within society. They inhibit the ability of rural groups to exercise political power relative to cities. And they They are foster clientelism and vote buying rather than programmatic linkages between parties and voters.