Factorial Design Analysis of the Relative Efficiency of Ghana Land Policies

Land markets are imperfect; they are often intervened by their host governments using the instrument of laws and regulations with the view, either to cure their imperfections or to prop them up. These policies may or may not yield the expected dividend. The trouble is, because the dividend yields of policies are not readily obvious, it is critical for them to be carefully gauged and regularly monitored. For the developing world, owing particularly to the generally high levels of noises in the available data, there are often fundamental difficulties in appraising the actual magnitude of dividends associated with particular property related policies. And very little studies are occurring in this area. Factorial designed statistical technique is employed in this study to analyse empirical data gathered in Ghana with the view to gauging the benefits that existing land policies in that country are respectively yielding. What emerges from this study is that, all the different strands of land policies in Ghana are producing positive benefits. The magnitude and significance of these benefits however vary with the policy type. Government compulsory purchase and compensation policies that have been used to acquire lands and distributed to private developers were found to be the most beneficial. The relatively high infrastructural investments and professional management in the areas so affected by this particular genre of land policy possibly account for this considerable benefits they are yielding. Land titling laws and regulations, in contrast, were found, rather surprisingly, to be offering insignificant benefits. Also, interactions among the various types of policies were unexpectedly found to be offering no real benefits at all with the effect that formalising land rights under more than one land policy type leads necessarily to extra costs without associated extra benefits. These results draw attention to the need to rethink the existing land titling arrangements in particular and governmentís infrastructure investments in general with the view to introducing a more beneficial alternative for the formalisation of land rights as well as balanced platform for all policies to contribute their optimal.