Informal land markets and ethnic kinship in West African cities

IF 3.5 2区 经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS Regional Science and Urban Economics Pub Date : 2024-04-06 DOI:10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2024.104008
Lucie Letrouit , Harris Selod
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Abstract

We present an urban land use model with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry regarding risks of contested land ownership, a very common issue in West African cities. A market failure emerges assellers do not internalize the impact of their market participation decision on the average quality of traded plots, which in turn affects other sellers and buyers’ decisions. The equilibrium is suboptimal and has too many transactions of insecure plots and too few transactions of secure plots. This market failure can be addressed when agents trade along trusted kinship lines that discourage undisclosed sales of insecure plots. Such kinship matching is an important feature of West African societies, including on the market for informal land, as illustrated by a unique survey administered in Bamako, Mali. In the model, the extent to which the market failure is addressed increases with the intensity of kinship ties. When sellers also have the possibility of registering their property right in a cadastre, this not only further attenuates information asymmetry but also helps reduce risk. We find complementarity between kinship matching and registration: As transactions along trusted kinship lines tend to involve plots that are more secure on average, kinship matching makes registration better targeted at insecure plots traded outside kinship ties.In this context, a partial registration fee subsidy can bring the economy to the social optimum.1

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西非城市的非正规土地市场和种族亲属关系
我们提出了一个城市土地利用模型,该模型存在土地使用权不安全和有关土地所有权争议风险的信息不对称问题,这在西非城市是一个非常普遍的问题。市场失灵的出现是由于卖方没有将其市场参与决策对交易地块平均质量的影响内在化,这反过来又影响了其他卖方和买方的决策。均衡是次优的,不安全地块的交易太多,而安全地块的交易太少。如果代理人按照可信任的亲属关系进行交易,阻止不安全地块的不公开销售,就可以解决这种市场失灵问题。正如在马里巴马科进行的一项独特调查所示,这种亲属关系匹配是西非社会的一个重要特征,包括非正规土地市场。在该模型中,市场失灵的解决程度随着亲属关系的紧密程度而增加。当卖方也有可能在地籍中登记其产权时,这不仅会进一步减少信息不对称,还有助于降低风险。我们发现亲属配对和登记之间存在互补性:在这种情况下,部分登记费补贴可以使经济达到社会最优水平1。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
5.30
自引率
9.70%
发文量
63
期刊介绍: Regional Science and Urban Economics facilitates and encourages high-quality scholarship on important issues in regional and urban economics. It publishes significant contributions that are theoretical or empirical, positive or normative. It solicits original papers with a spatial dimension that can be of interest to economists. Empirical papers studying causal mechanisms are expected to propose a convincing identification strategy.
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