Property Rights and Development: Property Rights and Rural Household Welfare

s downloaded 86 50* 19 39 44 Titles forward/ backwards searched 9 7 2 4 0 Full titles downloaded from Scopus 47 43 21 40 39 2.2 Derivation of the evidence base In this section, we discuss the potential impact of the search strategy and evidence quality assessment criteria in deriving the evidence base that underpins the key finding of the Briefing Papers. Issues raised by the search strategy Although the strategy was designed to do a wide-ranging search and include as many relevant studies as possible, the results of the search process highlighted some potential bias towards particular types of studies and evidence, namely: Literature published in journals While efforts were made to include other types of papers, including working papers, conference papers and other reports, most of the papers selected and analysed were journal articles or working papers intended for publication, and excluded books (including edited volumes and monographs). This is due mainly to the greater visibility and accessibility of journal articles through database searches as they generally include full metadata which is picked up by search engines. Such articles are also more likely to be cited and referenced in other studies. Property Rights and Rural Household Welfare 4 Explicitly empirical and economic-based papers The explicit focus on ‘evidence’ in the review process is likely to have led to bias towards papers which emphasise their methodology or use of data. On the whole, papers from the economics discipline were more likely to include more details on their use of ‘data’ and ‘evidence’, although a loose application of search terms (i.e. relaxing use of ‘data’ or ‘evidence’ was consciously used in order to include other terms). As a result, perspectives from some disciplines are not fully represented, notably history, politics, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology. Impact of the methodology to assess quality of evidence The exclusion of particular types of evidence by the search strategy is compounded by the criteria for assessing the quality of the evidence that could be considered, provided in DfID’s draft Guidelines (Assessing the Quality of Social Science Research Evidence: Summary). This emphasises measurement aspects of evidence, in the principles of validity and reliability, implying a preference for quantitative studies over qualitative studies using inductive methods. Focus on particular types of evidence In the context of research on property rights, the implicit preference for quantitative studies runs the risk of excluding a significant body of work relevant to the issue and providing only for a partial review of the evidence. The different standards of emphasis on, and transparency of, research design and methods in different disciplines may also mean that research produced by those disciplines that bring design and methodology to the fore are likely to be given higher quality scores. An additional concern is that the inclusion of the number of studies as a factor in assessing the strength of the evidence may mean that the numbers can be influenced by concentrated research efforts in particular places run by particular research groups (for example, in the land case, highland Ethiopia by the World Bank/IFPRI). The contextual factors of the location and the wider issues of knowledge building that are associated with particular research efforts (which may have disciplinary or policy biases) are, as a result, downplayed. Resource implications The criteria provided in the summary guidelines could be seen as a first hurdle for most peer-reviewed articles to be accepted into a journal without distinguishing further between the quality of different articles. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal would normally be taken as a minimum threshold for quality assurance and has been used as such in this study. If the peer review process is not seen to be adequate and further verification is deemed necessary, this implies that a much greater volume of resources would be needed as it can take a lot of time to delve deeply into the methodology of individual studies to assess how well they fulfil the different assessment criteria. For example, in the literature looking at the link between secure property rights and economic growth, there are articles published (and used in the literature review) that discuss in great depth a single parameter used in one model compared to another (e.g., the instrumental variable), an exercise that could not be reproduced with the scope of work and budget provided for the literature review. Indeed, a thorough assessment would imply verifying primary data, which is not always available, and again, would be extremely resource intensive for a wide-ranging literature review which uses broad inclusion criteria. The guidelines appear to privilege experimental design but it can be difficult to work out, for example, whether a study was really quasi-experimental or whether it was intended to be an experimental design but was not done strictly according to criteria for 4 The review team were provided with draft guidelines by DfID, which are similar but not entirely equal to the recent guidelines published on DfID’s webpage. The guidelines served as a filter for including only evidence that was of reasonably good quality and comparing contrasting evidence on different points. Property Rights and Rural Household Welfare 5 this. There may also be academic disputes about whether conditions in the area of study created a natural experiment or not. Requiring the reviewer to make a judgement on the debates is time-consuming, and the reviewer may not be equipped to do this in the context of a broad literature review. This means that a very brief summary of the state of evidence is risky to apply; even classifying studies according to whether they are really experimental or quasi-experimental is challenging — without going back into the primary data, it is not really possible to make a robust assessment. Issues of aggregation Not all the principles of quality laid out in the guidelines establish an equal threshold for assessment (e.g., the criterion of acknowledging the existing body of research is much less rigorous and easier to meet than, for example, that of demonstrating measurement validity). This makes it difficult to aggregate all the principles into a single arrow or indicator of strength and quality of evidence. The challenges of property rights as a research focus In the case of property rights, the different dimensions and interpretations of property rights in the literature and the greater complexity relative to specific interventions, such as cash transfers, have made it difficult to tease out causality from statistical econometric analysis. Forms of property rights influence but do not necessarily determine real or perceived security of property, the effects of which may affect investment and innovation through perhaps four main paths, but which may equally engender all manner of other linkages within systems, some of which we may not appreciate, and which depend heavily on context (and it can be hard to define what elements of context matter most). Cross-country regression cannot deal fully with this, even if it can produce some indicative results. Qualitative analysis can provide additional insight into understanding the contexts that create the variegated patterns. As such, it can be difficult to come to a firm conclusion about the overall strength of the evidence although we do make some comments on this during our analysis of the evidence. In the Briefing Papers, we have strived to make this as transparent as possible, highlighting and discussing the nature of the evidence, and trying to provide an informed sense of the broader pattern. Property Rights and Rural Household Welfare 6 3 Land rights and rural household welfare – theoretical and conceptual issues 3.1 Defining secure property rights “Property” This review focuses on immobile, fixed assets, namely housing and land. It does not include discussions of intellectual property nor more sociological associations with belonging or a sense of connection to a place. It also does not include discussions around other, moveable types of assets, such as warehouse receipts, as this implies a much broader discussion of a different nature drawing on a different set of literature. “Rights” Our analysis takes a working definition of a property right as the control over assets and the “return to the assets that are produced and improved” (Rodrik 2000) or “residual rights of control (over assets)” (Grossman and Hart 1986; Segal and Whinstone 2010) rather than “ownership of assets”. This control can take various forms and is backed up by laws, regulations and policies or social norms — institutions — that define, negotiate, monitor and enforce property rights. Rather than a single “right”, discussions of property rights often refer to “bundles” of inter-related rights (Everest-Phillips 2008; Besley and Ghatak 2009) which involve the right to use, sell, transfer/bequeath, allow use by others and restrict use by others. These rights can often overlap and be contested, as the right of one person to do something with an asset can have implications for someone else’s rights, actual or potential. In addition, rights are vested at different levels – individual, household, community – with different content of rights at these different levels (e.g. some individuals may be able to use a resource, or harvest natural resources, but not to transact or alienate a resource). Who holds the rights and how this is determined is a focus for the review, e.g. ‘owners’ versus ‘tenants’ and intra-household issues, eg. the rights of women to ‘family’ land. “Security” Broadly speaking, a property right is secure when the right holder perceives it to be stable and predictable over a reasonable period of time and protected from expropriation or arbitrary change, with claims that