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Property Rights and Development

Title

Property Rights and Development

Author

Frye, Timothy

Research Area

Social Processes

Topic

Property Rights

Abstract

There is a strong consensus that secure property rights are critical for economic development, but tricky issues about the direction of causation and measurement have made it difficult to demonstrate this relationship empirically. In recent years, scholars have made progress on these issues. In the future, scholars can profitably turn their attention to four issues: (i) why privatization is so unpopular, (ii) how politics shapes property rights, (iii) the distributional consequences of property rights, and (iv) the impact of violence on property rights and economic development.