land-related investment (Besley 1995) and reduce the need for land owners to expend resources to stake out or defend their claims. The latter can be of particular importance for groups, e.g., women, whose access to land was traditionally discriminated against (Joireman 2008).

Positive impacts of more secure land tenure on investment and land values in rural areas have been demonstrated in China (Jacoby _et al._ 2002), Thailand (Feder _et al._ 1988), Latin America (Deininger and Chamorro 2004, Field _et al._ 2006, Bandiera 2007, Fort 2007), Eastern Europe (Rozelle and Swinnen 2004), and Africa (Deininger and Jin 2006, Goldstein and Udry 2006). In urban areas, efforts to enhance tenure security have led to higher levels of self-assessed land values (Lanjouw and Levy 2002), increased investment in housing (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2005) and female empowerment (Field 2005). Receipt of titles allowed former squatters, especially females, to join formal labor markets instead of staying at home to guard their land, thereby increasing their income and reducing child labor (Field 2007). Joint titles helped reduce fertility (Field 2003), increased investment in children’s human capital (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2004) and improved educational outcomes (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2005). The way in which property rights to land could be exercised affected governance and corruption (Lobo and Balakrishnan 2002) and performance of local institutions (Deininger and Jin 2008).

The size of tenure-security and investment effects will depend on the attractiveness of investment opportunities and the reduction in enforcement efforts, i.e., it will be larger where tenure has been very insecure or the level of conflict high. A key policy issue, especially in Africa, is not only whether expected benefits are large enough to justify the cost but also whether a process can be implemented in an equitable manner and the institutions required can be sustained over time. Emphasis on individual title has often been associated with a failure to recognize the wide spectrum of joint and communal rights as well as local institutions that may have had more effective local presence than a distant state. As a result, efforts to improve tenure security may have weakened or extinguished some rights, displaced institutions without providing alternatives, and in doing so disempowered certain groups and increased rather than reduced conflict. Adoption of a sporadic rather than systematic approach and lack of safeguards such as wide dissemination of information and a transparent and public adjudication process with possibility for appeal have often set off a speculative clamor for land which, if not checked, may have led to interventions reinforcing or exacerbating pre-existing inequalities, with little positive impact on growth. Finally, failure to ensure that the cost of first-time registration as well as updating of registry records, in relation to land values, is commensurate the benefits, has often made it difficult to either complete first registration or keep the registry up to date. A combination of these issues has limited the effectiveness of or benefits from efforts at land registration in many African contexts (Pinckney and Kimuyu 1994, Bruce 3