Sub-Saharan Africa has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last fifty years yet economic development has remained elusive. In many countries absolute poverty has increased and life expectancy has declined. Karol Boudreaux and Paul Aligica argue that the results of...

Formal private property rights (“FPPRs”) have been advocated as an important prerequisite to economic development: a legal right to property ownership motivates economic players to engage in economic activities when these activities yield property interests, and this, in turn, contributes to...

This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending the existing literature on the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economic development. It addresses two fundamental and related questions concerning the relationship between property rights and...

From 2008 onwards, developing countries have seen a surge in acquisitions of large areas of agricultural land by international investors. If local farmers have secure property rights and services that support business are available, positive spillover from the acquisitions is expected to drive...

Protecting the entitlements of some inherently requires preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. Yet much recent research regarding property rights and economic development treats the level of property rights security in a country as homogeneous. This one-dimensional...

Using a new set of indicators that measure the Property Insecurity of ethnopolitical minority groups, I find that Property Insecurity is not correlated with the Risk of Expropriation facing foreign investors and domestic elites – revealing that the aggregate measures of 'institutional quality'...