of registered transfers and mortgages. We describe the DID strategy used to evaluate the impact of titling and, as policy changes that affect everybody equally will not be identified by such an approach, complement it with spatial aggregation of administrative as the basis for before-after regressions using block fixed effects to provide _inter alia_ estimates of reform impacts on the likelihood of sporadically or systematically registered plots being subject to a registered sale or mortgage transaction.

# **3.1 Evidence from administrative data**

To obtain a complete set of registry and cadaster data covering the period of 1981 to 2019 inclusive for all of Maseru as a basis for assessing program impacts, paper records for all registered transactions (including transfers, and mortgages) for the period before LAA migrated to a functional digital platform were digitized. Although such data lack information on owners’ socio-economic characteristics or the presence, size or characteristics of structures, they include information on gender of registered owner(s) as well as start and end date as well as type of each transaction, allowing us to compute actual time required for completing a registration as an intermediate outcome.<sup>8</sup> Table 1 presents descriptive statistics using these data for the entire 39-year period (1981-2019) for which data are available in column 1 and three sub-periods, namely (i) the 1981-2009 pre-reform period (column 2); (ii) the 2010-2013 implementation period following passage of the Land Act and establishment of LAA (column 3); and (iii) the 2014-19 post-program period of routine LAA operation (column 4). Wherever possible, figures are disaggregated by subject of registration to assess the reform’s gender focus.

The rate of annual titles issued increased from 560 before reform to 12,450 during implementation before leveling off at 4,020 in the post-implementation period. While all registrations were sporadic before 2010, 87% and 39% followed a systematic approach during and after implementation, respectively, bringing the total number of systematically registered plots to 52,700 or 58% of the total.<sup>9</sup> Figure 2 shows that the number of sporadically issued leases increased at a slow pace before 2010 and accelerated thereafter. Project-supported systematic registration was piloted in 2011 and 2012, rolled out at large scale in 2013, and dropped to essentially zero after 2014.

We also note a monotonic increase (from 137 in the pre- to 480 in the post-implementation period) in the annual number of registered mortgages; an increase in the share of mortgages issued for plots jointly held or registered exclusively to women from 2% to 41% and 18% to 23% with an average loan size of about US$ 41,000 in the post-implementation period; and a decrease in the loans issued to plots registered

> 8 Contrary to the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ indicators that refer to a hypothetical transaction and thus constitute a lower bound if procedures are followed efficiently, these figures refer to actual processes.

> 9 Table 1 shows that the share of commercial as well as residential land decreased from 15% and 83% in the pre-reform period to 6% and 79% in the post-reform era, a shift largely accounted for by an increase from 4% to 15% in the share of newly registered ‘other’ or mixed use land.

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