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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2020

Trust or property rights? Can trusted relationships substitute for costly land registration in West African cities?

Résumé

We present an urban land use model with land registration decisions and potential ethnic matching between buyers and sellers of informal land. We use the model to study the market failures associated with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry regarding risks of contested land ownership, an endemic problem in sub-Saharan African cities. Although registration allows owners to make land plots secure by paying to register them in a cadaster?thereby reducing both information asymmetry and tenure insecurity?, the decision to register land plots can be hindered by high registration costs. Ethnic matching, on the other hand, attenuates information asymmetry as sellers are socially discouraged to sell risky plots to their ethnic kin, but it also reduces the overall participation of landowners to the land market. The equilibrium city structure is aligned with stylized facts, with registration being more prevalent closer to the center of the city and ethnic matching further away. A gradual reduction of registration costs is predicted to move the economy towards a pure registration system with only impersonal sales. In contrast, when registration costs are high, the impact of a registration subsidy will be enhanced by the possibility of ethnic matching, as interpersonal sales allow to separate risks and to better target policy recipients.
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Dates et versions

hal-04111623 , version 1 (31-05-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04111623 , version 1

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Lucie Letrouit, Harris Selod. Trust or property rights? Can trusted relationships substitute for costly land registration in West African cities?. Virtual Urban Economics Association Conference 2020, Oct 2020, Conférence en virtuel, France. 37p. ⟨hal-04111623⟩
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