others simplified bureaucratic procedures (including eliminating a need for Ministerial consent) to register mortgages was followed by systematic titling in 2011-13. Building on a 2006 law that, for the first time, allowed married women to independently own assets, procedural reform and titling increased women’s level of registered rights in the short term.<sup>9</sup> Regulatory reform and institutional restructuring improved market functioning, in particular mortgage markets, an effect that was quick for already registered parcels but took longer for land formalized via the systematic land registration program. In the longer term, the stock of systematically and sporadically registered parcels significantly increased mortgage market activity but, partly due to systematic differences in parcel characteristics that affected their marketability and suitability as collateral, the estimated impact of the stock of sporadically registered parcels remained larger than that of systematically registered ones 7 years after the end of the program (Ali & Deininger 2021b).

<mark>In the case of Ethiopia discussed above, lack of clear instructions on how to keep registries current led to great variation in updating procedures and quality as well as currency of registries across villages</mark> (Cochrane & Hadis 2019). It triggered <mark>a push for ‘second round’ certification, i.e. the creation of a computerized centralized registry for rural but not for urban areas that</mark> was implemented in 2014–20 at a cost of US$6 per parcel (Zein 2021). <mark>Limited interest in</mark> (Bezu & Holden 2014) <mark>and benefits from this intervention</mark> (Ghebru & Girmachew 2020) are <mark>consistent with the notion that a central registry will have higher payoffs and thus be easier to establish and sustain in urban areas. Yet, successive efforts to digitize registries in the national and regional capitals were unsuccessful. With restrictions on land sales and rental impeding use of land as collateral, lack of demand may well undermine the sustainability of a fully digital rural registry.</mark>

# **2.4 Performance of African land institutions and opportunities for improvement**

Table 1 combines data from a range of sources on the basis and perception of land institutions’ performance in Africa by region. Panel A shows that formal land registries in Africa are characterized by high cost and often poor service: Formal fees to register a land transfer (without a survey) amount to more than 7% of parcel value on average. Limited digitization and coverage are one reason: of 53 Sub-Saharan African countries, only two (Rwanda and Kenya) report having a digital link between registry and cadaster; four claim to have most of the main city covered with a cadaster and a registry, and four that getting a first instance court ruling for a typical land dispute takes below a year. Inefficient and costly service provision reduces the scope for realizing the benefits from land rights by individuals and the state, including land value capture: On average, African countries collect less than 0.2% of GDP in property taxes vs. 2% in developed economies overall and much more in the UK, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, or the US.

> 9 Consistent with evidence on ambiguous effects of legal reforms not backed by regulation in patriarchal societies such as India (Anderson & Genicot 2015) or Pakistan (Beg _et al._ 2021), the 2006 law alone did not affect women’s access to registered land rights.

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