The Two Sides of De Soto: Property Rights, Land Titling, and Development

This essay examines Hernando De Soto’s work on property rights, which can be viewed as providing two separate testable hypotheses: 1) secure property rights are positively correlated with access to credit and capital formation, which leads to economic development, and 2) land titling programs provides the means to secure property rights. In particular, Williamson argues that Hypothesis 1 is supported by both theoretical and empirical arguments, while Hypothesis 2 lacks empirical evidence.