In his classic book, Structure and Change in Economic History, Douglass North sums up the nature of the ancient Egyptian state. As religious ruler, the pharaoh was the ultimate owner of land, which was controlled mainly by temples and state officials. But when the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 BC, agrarian property rights were at a turning point. Private landowners became politically dominant an...

This paper shows how property rights insecurity can result in the reproduction of local inequalities because of social matching in assets markets. A principal-agent framework is used to model the landlord’s decision to rent when he takes into account the risk of losing the land and contract enforcement is decreasing in social distance with his tenant. These effects are quantified for the case o...

Improving security of tenure over agricultural land has recently been the focus of a number of large land certification programs. While the main justification for these efforts was to increase productive investments and facilitate land rental transactions, we show that if access rights were tied to actual land use in the previous regime, these programs can also lead to increased outmigration fr...

The international initiatives by various agencies (such as World bank, FAO, UN, FIG, etc.) suggest that cadastre and land registration systems are currently undergoing major changes worldwide. On such changes, the emerging trends focus on easy access to land, security of land tenure, establishment and operation of efficient land markets, formalization of property rights, incorporating customary...

Projects to secure land rights for the urban poor have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa for over 30 years. A recurrent issue in such projects is the provision of sustainable land tenure for beneficiaries. Commonly, individual titles with restrictions on resale have been used. Despite these, recipients often sell their land rights to more affluent city dwellers exacerbating the growth of s...

Issues relating to land are specifically referred in five of the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and UN-Habitat’s Global Land Tools Network views access tenure security as key achieving sustainable, inclusive efficient cities. The African continent is growing importance, with climate change population pressure on land. This review explores an interdisciplinary approach, i...