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.

This chapter uses original subnational data on land reform in Peru as well as data on property rights and metrics of development to investigate how the creation of local-level property rights gaps shaped subsequent economic and social outcomes linked to development. The analyses utilize a geographic regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of Peru’s regional approach to land reform through zones that did not entirely map onto major pre-existing administrative boundaries. These zones were created with aid from the United States in the aftermath of World War II. This chapter finds that local property rights gaps in Peru drove a slower shift away from agricultural labor, lower agricultural productivity and educational attainment, and higher rates of inequality and poverty. Land titling that began under President Fujimori's neoliberal reforms helped to close the property rights gap. But some of its negative development consequences persisted, in part due to a return to land inequality. The findings are not driven by Peru's civil war, pre-reform hacienda presence, or public goods provision.

This chapter employs original data on land reform and property rights to empirically test the theory. Using data from Latin America from 1920–2010 and cross-tabulation, regression, and instrumental variables analysis, the chapter find strong evidence in support of the theory that property rights gaps are generated by authoritarian regimes where the ruling coalition of political elites does not overlap with landed elites. In contrast, property rights gaps are typically closed by democracies, especially when peasants are in the ruling coalition and legislative fractionalization does not give opposition lawmakers a chance to block reform. Property rights gaps are also closed by both authoritarian regimes and democracies when countries are forced into structural adjustment programs. And left-wing ideology and state capacity play a role well in property rights gaps. This chapter also finds that the governments that redistribute property without rights also distort crop prices to render beneficiaries dependent on the government, and through a comparative analysis of nationalizations of banks and natural resources shows that the withholding of property rights over land is strategic.

This chapter examines land reform and property rights globally. First, it generates an original account of the principal features of property rights over land that governments have granted to beneficiaries in the course of all major redistributive land reform programs from 1900 to 2010, including land titling, nationalization, collectivization, and the formation of cooperatives. Second, it shows that democracy, dictatorship, foreign pressure, coalitions among landed elites, political elites, and peasants, and legislatures under democracy impact the opening and closing of property rights gaps around the globe as in Latin America. Finally, it conducts process-tracing exercises in Portugal and China to demonstrate further support for the theory's causal mechanisms and weigh that support against alternative explanations tied to ideology and limited state capacity. The discussion of China illuminates the enormous economic, social, and human costs – and political benefits – of retaining a large property rights gap for decades on end. Weak property rights contributed to the Great Famine, and then partial property rights reforms ignited national development in the countryside and in cities.

The concluding chapter discusses limitations to the property rights paradigm. Neoliberal property rights are not a cure-all for rural development. There is an emerging consensus from the United Nations, World Bank, and FAO on the need for more context-specific property rights and international guidelines on how to respect, record, and strengthen such rights, especially customary rights. The conclusion then shows how the book’s theory speaks to the broader relationship between politics and markets beyond land and redistribution. States can generate new markets or enable the rise of markets, or new markets can arise organically. A government can then choose whether, and how, to delineate and protect property rights in those markets. Like with property rights in land, a country’s political institutions (democracy vs. dictatorship) as well as government coalitional dynamics (between elite factions and citizens) and foreign pressure determine property rights regimes. The conclusion applies to the evolution of subsoil property rights over oil in Mexico, subsoil mining rights for mineral natural resources in the United States, and property rights in the banking sector in Venezuela.

This chapter examines land reform and property rights in Peru, which was characterized by high landholding inequality and semi-feudal landlord peasant relations until the 1960s, with roots in Spanish colonization. A transition to democracy brought initial land reform, and then a military coup in 1968 began massive land redistribution. Peasants received land through cooperatives but not property rights such as land titles. Property rights were strengthened slightly under democracy in the 1980s, but major land titling only began when Peru was facing a major economic crisis and the Shining Path insurgency in the early 1990s. President Fujimori closed Congress via an autogolpe and then worked with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to stabilize the economy and begin a nationwide land formalization program. This chapter uses process tracing, original archival documents, and interviews to detail the economic and political conditions that led to the origins and closing of Peru’s property rights gap, focusing on democracy, dictatorship, foreign pressure, and the role of landed elites, peasants, and political elites.

This chapter begins with existing explanations for rights informality: weak state capacity, left-wing ideology, and competing state goals. It then develops a theory for understanding why governments that distribute land often withhold property rights, presiding over widespread rural property informality for long periods, and why other governments grant more secure property rights over land. Authoritarian regimes tend to redistribute land from large landowners to peasants but withhold property rights. Democracies often grant property rights to beneficiaries of previous land reforms but do not redistribute additional property. This difference is driven by how political regimes empower or disempower landed elites and peasants, differences in institutional powers, and constraints that political elites face, and the incentives of incumbency and political competition. Democracies are better at channeling popular demands into policy. But policies can also be blocked by the powerful in a legislature. Finally, foreign pressure during economic crisis can force a country to turn to international financial institutions for help. Privatization and greater security of property rights can be a condition for support.

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.