Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s ideas are being studied. From Barrio Study Links Land Ownership To a Better Life:
The Argentine study followed 1,800 squatter families who in 1981 occupied a one-square-mile piece of what they assumed was public land. It had once served as a garbage dump. Through a quirk of the legal system, roughly half of the settlers in the heart of the neighborhood gained title to their properties, while the other half didn’t. The researchers found that over the course of two decades, the title holders surpassed those without them in a host of key social indicators, ranging from quality of house construction to educational performance to rates of teenage pregnancy.Households with titles didn’t earn more money than those without them and had access to only a modest amount more credit. Nevertheless, they adopted a more entrepreneurial mindset and shucked the fatalism and fear of being tossed off their land that mark the poor throughout the region. They believed hard work would pay off for their families.
“You give people titles and they start to feel they belong to society,” says Harvard-trained economist Ernesto Schargrodsky of the Torcuato Di Tella University, who studied the barrio with Sebastián Galiani of University of San Andrés and Rafael Di Tella of Harvard Business School.