legally required documentation, at the speed required, made it virtually impossible for members of cooperatives to formally make the _de jure_ transition to individual land ownership. The productive inefficiency of collectives and the need to continue fighting legal battles for their land led to a precipitous economic decline of the cooperative sector and a wave of distress sales (Jonakin 1997), both of which affected primarily the poorest groups in the population. More recent case studies also illustrate that the poor spent considerable amounts of money or even had to sell portions of their lands to hire lawyers to defend their land claims in legal cases that were often of dubious nature (Merlet and Pommier, 2000).

To realize the benefits associated from better definition of property rights, various donors have provided resources for clarification of the legal framework and land titling and registration. A World-Bank project, with the general objective to carry out a rural cadastre, modernize the system of national land registry, and to regularize the situation of beneficiaries from agrarian reform under the Sandinista as well as subsequent governments, has since 1992 awarded more than 40,000 titles all over the country. With titling of the "reform sector" almost completed, policy-makers are now interested to examine not only the impact of this intervention but also to explore whether there is justification for expanding these programs, possibly in a modified form, to the "non-reform sector", i.e. all the lands under private land ownership.

A number of design aspects of this program provide a background for an evaluation which, by assessing the impact of the past program, can help to provide an answer to this policy question. First, emphasis in this as well as most other donor-financed projects was on the "Agrarian Reform Sector", i.e. lands that were distributed under pre- and-post- 1990 agrarian reforms. Titling of these lands was almost completed during the period under concern. To the extent that wealthy land owners had already undertaken the steps necessary to formalize their land claims, this process is likely to have been well targeted towards the poor. Second, the nature of titles awarded changed significantly during the period under concern. While initially, beneficiaries received only a title certificate which fell short of full legal proof of ownership, realization of the fact that these were deficient in many respects led subsequently to official instructions to give out only titles that had also been properly registered. Supply-side variables such as shortages in staffing and availability of funds, as well as complex procedures, appear to have limited the implementation of this order on the ground. As only registered titles provide evidence that any possible claims by previous land-owners had been settled, they imply a much higher level of tenure security. Finally, the program was offered to beneficiaries free of direct cost and provided assistance to meet the indirect costs in terms of time, transportation, and the transaction costs associated with obtaining proper documentation (e.g. birth certificates and identification cards) that are still needed for participation.

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