1 - Introduction

Summary

This chapter starts with the puzzle of why governments would distribute land without property rights. It then provides an overview of the evolution of property rights in Latin America from Spanish colonization through decolonization into the present. This period covered land appropriation and forced labor, high landholding inequality, and private property rights by landed elites and the church that were in many countries stripped through land redistribution. But rural peasants received land in collectives, cooperatives, informally, or through nationalizations rather than with individual land titles. The chapter provides a conceptualization of the property rights gap and a typology of different gaps. It frames why withholding property rights is puzzling from the economics perspective that property rights support investment, efficiency, and development. It previews existing explanation for rights informality, including weak state capacity, left-wing ideology, and competing state goals. The chapter then summarizes how authoritarian regimes withhold rights to exert rural social control and democracies and foreign pressure can extend rights.