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Reforming land rights in sub-saharan africa
Platteau, Jean-Philppe
Platteau, Jean-Philppe
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dp60.pdf
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Abstract
"The basic idea underlying structural adjustment programmes is that adjustment should involve not only the introduction of better macroeconomic management policies (implying a more effective regulation of aggregate demand) but also the carrying out of structural reforms aimed at creating more incentives for economic growth. What these structural reforms precisely amount to is not always clear, yet there is no doubt that privatization of public assets is the outstanding component of the structural reform package. In the agricultural sector, emphasis is generally put on privatization of marketing boards and other distributional parastatal agencies on the grounds that they are inefficiently run and impose unfavourable terms of trade on the peasantry. What the ownership status of rural land assets ought to be is a complex question that is less decisively answered, even though the dominant view stresses the efficiency advantages of duly formalized private property in land. In this paper, we consider this issue in the specific context of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which is characterized by major macro-economic problems, low overall economic growth and poor agricultural performance. Until the beginning of the 1970s, the attention of land reformers was almost exclusively focused on Latin America and Asia. Africa was commonly considered to be a “special case” that had fewer worries because of its abundant land endowments. It is true that SSA did not have private property rights in land, yet this did not really matter since, as long as communallyowned resources are abundant, the absence of such rights cannot have serious consequences. Indeed, the main argument put forward by proponents of the so-called Property Rights School is that “a primary function of property rights is that of guiding incentives to achieve a greater internalization of externalities” (Demsetz, 1967:348). Richard Posner expressed the advantage of private property rights in a less abstract way: “The proper incentives [for economic efficiency] are created by the parcelling out among the members of society of mutually exclusive rights to the exclusive use of particular resources. If every piece of land is owned by someone, in the sense that there is always an individual who can exclude all others from access to any given area, then individuals will endeavour by cultivation or other improvements to maximize the value of land...” (Posner, 1977:10). What needs to be emphasized is that, when land is plentiful, to maintain communal rights (in the sense of general rights to use a resource that fail to include the right to exclude others from using it except by prior and continuing use) makes good economic sense since the gains from internalization necessarily remain small compared to the costs: externalities are of such small significance that it does not pay anyone to take them into account. In other words, “there is no positive value to society of creating clearly defined property rights in land” (Johnson, 1972:271), especially because the costs of enforcing these rights are high when rural dwellers are scattered and population densities are low (a description that perfectly fits the case of SSA)."(pg 1)
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1995-03
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With permission of the license/copyright holder