| The assignment of private property rights has been praised as one effective policy option to assure that resources are put into their most valued use by ensuring economic agents that the rewards for their work will be in their hands. When talking about private property rights over land, this policy has been implemented in the form of titling projects, under the assumption that titles signal secure land tenure. I question the presumption that titles are equivalent to secure tenure and consequently shift the focus of study to the issue of land tenure security: under what economic conditions do we expect land tenure insecurity, what are the real means to attain tenure security, and what is the effect of secure tenure on resource use. The research is done in the Ucayali region of Peruvian Amazonia to further assess the relevance to titling projects to address problems of environmental degradation. Results show the importance of institutional constraints, in the form of regulations regarding access to land, in the way land tenure is secure in Amazonian. These regulations imply the dissipation of rents and resource degradation to secure tenure, and the relative irrelevance to title for it. To assess the effect of secure tenure on resource use, econometric analysis was performed using the Peruvian National Survey of Rural Households (ENAHR), done in 1984. In shaping resource use, characteristics of farmers, farm size, and market conditions prove more important than tenure security in the form of title. |
