and Migot-Adholla 1994, Jacoby and Minten 2007) and it will be important to check whether the case at hand was able to address some of these.

Being able to access reliable information on individuals’ land ownership at low-cost through a public registry will also reduce the cost of exchanging land in markets for rental or sales. Rental allows land owners to tap new sources of income while still maintaining land as a means of insurance or old-age protection while those who remain in farming can consolidate and cultivate larger areas. Having a certificate can allay fears that land that has been rented can be lost, either to the government through redistribution, or to the tenant who will not vacate it upon termination of the lease period. This could be useful in contexts where migration will require land owners to be temporarily absent or if the number of transactions increases beyond the level that can be handled by informal mechanisms at the local level in a transparent way. In China, rental contributed to occupational diversification and was estimated to have increased productivity by about 60% (Deininger and Jin 2008). In Vietnam, award of certificates is estimated to not only have prompted investment in perennials (by 7.5% compared to no certificates) but also an 11-12 week expansion of the time households spent in non-agricultural activity, an effect that was particularly pronounced for the poor (Do and Iyer 2008).

Key benefits from possession of formal land title for land sales are the ability to exchange land with strangers and the associated ability to use land as collateral for credit (de Soto 2000).<sup>1</sup> The reason is that, if a reliable land registry provides a formal and low-cost way to identify land ownership without the need of physical inspection or inquiry with neighbors, land is ideal as collateral. At the same time, for credit effects from formal registration to materialize, households will need to have otherwise bankable projects, be credit-worthy, and willing to take the associated risk (Boucher _et al._ 2008). Moreover, land markets need to be sufficiently liquid to make a sale feasible within a given time if needed, implying that land rights are fully transferable and neither legal provisions nor social conventions limit foreclosure. While credit effects of land titling are reported in the literature (Feder _et al._ 1988), positive impacts were often limited to larger land owners (Mushinski 1999, Carter and Olinto 2003) and studies fail to find credit effects even in settings where such an effect was expected (Field _et al._ 2006, Fort 2007). Even if profitable projects exist, legal restrictions on land sales (Sundet 2004), limited commercial value of the land under question (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2005, Payne _et al._ 2008) and social or political considerations to limit foreclosure (Field and Torero 2006) may jeopardize realization of credit effects and imply that such effects may be less readily realized than sometimes suggested by their protagonists.

> 1 The large differences in the ratio of credit to GDP across countries is used as a key argument to justify interventions to formalize land rights that could then allow greater use of land as a collateral to access credit (de Soto 2000, Besley and Ghatak 2008).

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