Breathing Life into Dead Theories about Property Rights: de Soto and Land Relations in Rural Africa
Presumption of a direct causal link between formalisation of property rights
and economic productivity is back on the international development agenda.
Belief in such a direct causal relationship had been abandoned in the early
1990s, following four decades of land tenure reform experiments that failed to
produce the anticipated efficiency results. The work of Hernando de Soto has
provided the springboard for this revival. De Soto argues that formal property
rights hold the key to poverty reduction by unlocking the capital potential of