Description
This indicator evaluates whether and to what extent governments are investing in secure land tenure, respect for intellectual property, and ease of land titling and transfer.
Relationship to Economic Growth
Secure land tenure plays a central role in the economic growth process by giving people long-term incentives to invest and save their income, enhancing access to essential public services, allowing for more productive use of time and money than protecting land rights, facilitating use of land as collateral for loans, and contributing to social stability and local governance.77 Improvements in tenure security also favor growth that is “pro-poor” because the benefits generally accrue to those who have not possessed such rights in the past and those who are affected most by high property registration costs.78 Land policy reform can be particularly meaningful for women: research shows that when women have secure access to land and are able to exercise control over land assets, their ability to earn income is enhanced, household spending on healthcare, nutritious foods, and children’s education increases, and human capital accumulation occurs at a faster rate. Women’s ability to inherit and possess control rights to land also serves as a crucial social safety net.79 Beyond land, property rights generally contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction.80
Methodology
Indicator Institution Methodology
This composite indicator is calculated as the weighted average of three indicators, each weighted equally. Note that countries with a GNI per capita above $4,496 are not ranked on the IFAD indicator due to lack of data.The sources for this indicator are the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), http://www.ifad.org, the World Bank’s Business Ready (B-Ready), https://www.worldbank.org/en/businessready, and the Heritage Foundation https://www.heritage.org/index/.
- Access to Land (IFAD): Produced by IFAD, this indicator assesses the extent to which the institutional, legal, and market framework provides secure land tenure and equitable access to land in rural areas. The sub-components can be found at https://webapps.ifad.org/members/eb/121/docs/EB-2017-121-R-3.pdf. IFAD’s operational staff base their assessments on a questionnaire and guideposts identifying the basis of each scoring level, available at https://webapps.ifad.org/members/eb/143/docs/EB-2024-143-R-17-Add-1.pdf, https://webapps.ifad.org/members/gc/45/docs/GC-45-L-4-Add-1.pdf, https://webapps.ifad.org/members/eb/125/docs/EB-2018-125-R-4-Add-1.pdf or https://webapps.ifad.org/members/gc/39/docs/GC-39-L-4.pdf. Past datasets can be found in the documents of IFAD’s governing council https://webapps.ifad.org/members/gc.
- Property Transfer and Land Administration (B-Ready): Produced by the World Bank’s B-Ready report, the Property Transfer and Land Administration (3.1 of the Business Location topic) component of this indicator measures whether firms view access to land as a major constraint, as well as the time and cost to transfer a property. B-Ready uses firm surveys to capture the de facto time and cost to register land. For more information on B-Ready’s methodology visit: https://www.worldbank.org/en/businessready/methodology.
- Property Rights (Heritage Foundation): This component is drawn from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. It includes three equally weighted sub-components: Risk of expropriation, respect for intellectual property rights, and the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, and law enforcement. More information on Heritage’s methodology can be found here: https://www.heritage.org/index/pages/about.
MCC Aggregation Methodology
MCC’s Property and Land Rights Score = [ (Normalized IFAD) ÷ 3] + [ (Normalized B-Ready) ÷ 3] + [ (Normalized Heritage) ÷ 3]
This index draws on 2024 “Access to Land” data from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 2024 data from B-Ready on Property transfer, and 2025 data from Heritage. Country scores are reported on the Scorecards as 2024 data. When any sub-source is missing, the normalized score for the others are used. When all are missing the indicator is missing.
Since each of the three sub-components of this index have different scales, MCC created a common scale for each of the indicators by normalizing them. Please see equations below. Each country is given a percentile rank between 0 and 1 for its income pool for each sub-source, excluding missing values. Then those sub-source percentile ranks are averaged together.
MCC Methodology to Normalize IFAD, B-Ready, and Heritage Data:
- Normalized IFAD = (Number of countries scoring below Country X on IFAD’s raw data in the income group) ÷ (Number of Countries scoring equal to or greater than Country X on IFAD’s raw data in the income group + Number of countries scoring below Country X on IFAD’s raw data in the income group)
- Normalized B-Ready = (Number of countries scoring below Country X on B-Ready’s raw data in the income group) ÷ (Number of Countries scoring equal to or greater than Country X on B-Ready’s raw data in the income group + Number of countries scoring below Country X on B-Ready’s raw data in the income group)
- Normalized Heritage = (Number of countries scoring below Country X on Heritage’s raw data in the income group) ÷ (Number of Countries scoring equal to or greater than Country X on Heritage’s raw data in the income group + Number of countries scoring below Country X on Heritage’s raw data in the income group)
For example, to calculate a given country X’s score, MCC first finds the number of countries that score worse than that country in the income pool, and the number of countries that have the same or better score than country X on the sub-source. MCC then divides the number of countries below by the sum of the number of countries below and the number of countries equal or above. Missing values are not included in these calculations. If one source is missing, the average of the normalized scores for the other two is used. If two sources are missing, the normalized score for the other is used. If all three are missing, the indicator is considered missing and assigned an “N/A”.