secondary rights (or group rights management) easier as it allows electronic gathering of consent to and costless transfer of resources directly to right holders without intermediaries. Harnessing these opportunities requires adjustments in the regulatory framework that will have to be tailored to local contexts.

Opportunities for urban job creation, activation of land and financial markets, and generation of public revenue from taxing land appreciation are vast. Realizing them requires (i) improving coverage, quality, and interoperability of urban property registries as well as land service delivery by digitizing, simplifying, and re-engineering workflows; (ii) reducing cost of registration and passing on associated savings to customers; (iii) replacing often prohibitive transaction taxes (stamp duties) with a recurrent land tax; and (iv) increasing transparency and trust by making data on land valuation for tax purposes and transaction prices publicly available and reducing bureaucracy through interoperability with other registries such as those for mortgages or court cases.

To harness human capital externalities from higher density in urban areas, land institutions can help by ensuring that (i) land titles and affordable registration fees allow (women) entrepreneurs to use land as collateral to create jobs and developers to access long-term finance to build durable high structures to provide floor space; (ii) public land is managed transparently to provide infrastructure and public services and rights to such land are allocated through transparent auctions rather than through backroom deals by politically connected organizers; (iii) building standards and planning rules contribute to public safety and reduction of externalities and are enforced impartially.

To replace agricultural area expansion with intensification and climate-smart adaptation as the main source of increased output, better functioning of rural factor markets to foster structural transformation is essential. The contribution of land to structural transformation can be enhanced by (i) securing women’s rights to land in case of inheritance or divorce via changes in (family) law and regulations to allow documentation at low cost; (ii) improving insurance, land, and labor markets by removing regulatory barriers to certain types of land transfers; (iii) operationalizing laws that allow low-cost documentation of communally and individually held rural land use rights by local authorities while ensuring data integrity and interoperability by linking up to a central database; (iv) encouraging long-term land transfers-including across generationsas a basis for investment and structural change; and (v) supporting decentralization by defining local bodies’ role in managing land use and benefit from higher land productivity through increased tax revenue rather than wasteful forum shopping or land speculation.

The importance of documenting private rights must not detract from the fact that, in both urban and rural areas, large amounts of land remain in public ownership or even encourage non-transparent appropriation of public land by the powerful private interests to be legitimized with outside support, especially as the value of such lands increases with better access infrastructure and increased demand for environmental 3