[ap-intact] COMMENTARY: Building Corruption Concerns into Land Registration Systems - A Lesson from Cambodia

"The low cost exchange of property is critical for economic growth, assuring that resources flow to those who can put them to their highest use.  But where property rights are insecure, where buyers can’t be sure that they will get an uncontested claim to what they purchase, that easy exchange will not occur... But while building a land titling and registration system in a developing country is an important step in boosting growth and improving citizen well-being, it is time-consuming, costly and can go wrong in many ways.  In a 2014 article in the Asian Journal of Law and Society [two New York University researchers] show how the failure to consider the vulnerability of the system to corruption derailed a Cambodian project and how greater attention to local context, in particular the high degree of corruption present in many Cambodian institutions, could have made for a far more successful project."

More from Rick Messick, in The Global Anticorruption Blog. http://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2015/10/28/building-corruption-concerns-into-land-registration-systems-a-lesson-from-cambodia/