Property Rights and Natural Resource Management Incentives: Do Transferability and Formality Matter?

This article examines how property rights expectations affect resource management incentives. It utilizes expected property rights over different timespans and of different strengths, corresponding to (a) investments of different intensities and (b) farmers' sense of security regarding their often de facto property rights. The results suggest that property rights and their alienability in ten-year time matter to intensive infrastructural investments, although not to lighter investments. Formality of property rights is shown to be insignificant to investment incentives, indicating that there is no functional difference between formal rights and customary rights at present in indigenous communities of the Philippines. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.