حقوق مالکیت، بهره وری، و منابع ملک رایج : بینش های کامبوج روستایی

This paper uses data from the 2003/04 Cambodia Household Socioeconomic Survey to investigate the effects of property rights to land. Plots held with a paper documenting ownership in rural Cambodia are found to have higher productivity and land values than other plots, while property rights have weak effects on access to credit. The paper also investigates whether the introduction of private property rights leads to decreased availability of common property resources. The data offers only weak support for this hypothesis. The general insight is that policies to strengthen land property rights can have important, positive effects on the rural economy, even in an environment of low state capacity.

Land rights in developing countries have received much attention in development policy and research in recent years. In the fiscal year 2004, the World Bank committed nearly one billion US$ to land administration, land titling, and other land reform projects (Conning & Deb, 2007). Various studies have investigated the effect of land rights on agricultural investment and productivity.2 This study contributes by investigating the effects of formal land rights, defined as government-issued land ownership documents, in a country where they have so far not been studied systematically, namely Cambodia. Cambodia is an illuminating case study due to its special circumstances, and a priori it is unclear whether formal land rights can be expected to be effective. On the one hand, years of Khmer Rouge rule, civil war, and social upheaval have severely eroded traditional, informal institutions. In this context, we might expect the introduction of formal rights to be important. On the other hand, state capacity in Cambodia is weak. If the ability of authorities to enforce rights is limited, the introduction of formal rights may be ineffective. This paper analyzes the effects of formal property rights on owner-operated plots, which covers a large majority of agricultural land in Cambodia. The results show that government-issued land ownership documents do in fact have a significant effect on the value of output in crop agriculture, and on land values. This paper attempts to investigate whether this effect works through the perceived tenure security (the “assurance effect”), through the credit market, or the land market. Results indicate that the main channel of causality is perceived tenure security. Land rights are found to have moderate effect on interest rates (households with formal rights pay less), although they have no effect on the propensity to use credit. The study also investigates whether the spread of formal, private property rights leads to decreased availability of common property resources. This question has so far received little attention in the literature. It is particularly important in Cambodia, where natural resources are an important source of rural livelihoods. The data offer weak support for the idea that formal, private property rights lead to erosion of common property resources. Section 2 discusses how property rights may affect agricultural outcomes. Section 3 describes the history of land property rights in Cambodia and Section 4 presents the data set and provides descriptive statistics. Section 5 investigates the effects of land rights on agricultural productivity. Endogeneity issues are taken into account through the use of a 2SLS estimator. Section 6 analyzes the effects of property rights on land values, while Section 7 investigates the channels of causation from land rights to productivity and land values. Section 8 tests the hypothesis of a negative effect of formal property rights on the availability of common property resources, and Section 9 concludes.

The effect of land property rights on rural economies is an important and controversial issue in development policy and research. Empirical results are ambiguous. Studies from Africa indicate that formal property rights to land may have no effect in an environment of weak institutions because of low capacity for enforcement. This paper investigated the effects of formal land property rights in an Asian country with low state capacity, namely Cambodia. The results indicate that the introduction of formal property rights to land in Cambodia have an economically and statistically significant, positive effect on agricultural productivity and land values of owner-operated plots. This suggests that land titling and certification programs can be effective policy instruments, even when the state is weak. This does not mean that state capacity is unimportant, but indicates that titling and certification programs are potentially relevant policy measures even at an early stage of a country’s institutional development. There is some evidence that formal property rights are only effective in the least remote regions. This suggests that the success of land titling in more remote regions is contingent on complementary policies to improve infrastructure and market institutions. I also analyzed the causal mechanisms by which property rights affect agricultural outcomes. No effect on land rental market activity was found, but a moderate effect of land papers on interest rates emerged. This effect, however, is too weak to fully account for the rather strong effect of property rights on productivity and land values. No effects of land papers on the propensity to use credit were found. By default, the “assurance effect” comes into focus. In spite of the fact that only a small share of plots in the HSES are reported to have been affected by disputes, a number of other sources document that land conflict is a salient issue in Cambodia, and is likely to be a concern for many households. Qualitative evidence suggests that land papers can have a significant effect on perceived tenure security. It is therefore plausible that the assurance effect is an important channel through which property rights affect agricultural production. This conclusion contrasts with the findings by Feder and Onchan (1987). They showed that positive effects of formal property rights to land in Thailand (a neighboring country of Cambodia) mainly work through the credit market. This difference is likely to be explained by the fact that credit markets are less developed in Cambodia than in Thailand, where tenure insecurity is also much less prevalent. Common property resources provide an important basis of livelihoods for poor rural households, and it might be feared that the spread of private property rights would decrease the availability of these resources. This hypothesis has not been tested before. It receives only weak support from the analysis. Given the nature of the data, these results should be treated as indicative rather than conclusive. Future research should focus on collecting more detailed information about the availability of common property resources, and about institutional quality at the local level. The implications of this paper for the ongoing, large scale titling program currently being implemented in Cambodia under the LMAP project are somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, the analysis shows that ownership documents have a significant effect on important outcomes. In that sense, there is encouragement to continue and expand the titling efforts. On the other hand, the land ownership documents analyzed in this paper are largely those that already existed prior to the present titling program, and the results indicate that these documents were quite effective. In many cases, the new LMAP titles are handed out to people who had application receipts or similar documents already. I therefore conclude by highlighting the importance of extending coverage to households with no ownership documents.