Essays on land property rights in Cambodia: empirical analysis

Abstract

This dissertation consists of four chapters on land rights in Cambodia. The first chapter focuses on historical background of land rights in Cambodia. De jure private property rights in land were first established in 1863. The civil wars of the 1970s led to an abolition of land property rights and it was again reintroduced in 1989 in which households could register their plots through sporadic land registration. The combination of a poorly functioning land registry system and rising demand for arable land led to a sharp increase in conflicts over land rights in the 1990s. To address these problems, the Cambodian government carried out a series of land policy reforms in the 1990s and introduced a systematic land registration in 2002 to speed up land registration in the country. The second chapter empirically estimates the effect of land property rights on investment in land by farm households in Cambodia using the 2003-2004 Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey (CSES). In this chapter, I use matching regression techniques, in particular Propensity Score Matching (PSM), to account for selection effects in household participation in land titling program. The empirical analysis indicates a positive link between de jure land rights and land investment. The third chapter estimates the effect of de jure land rights on household consumption. Instrumental variable techniques are used to account for endogeneity of de jure land rights. The results show that the choice to obtain de jure land rights results in a statistically significant increase in household consumption. The fourth chapter explores the relationship between de jure land rights and child health in households of land owners in Cambodia. The 2003-2004 CSES which is used to estimate this effect contains information of 8,745 children ages below 6 years old. The findings show that children of titled parcels have higher height-for-age z-scores than children of untitled parcels.