Marginal Benefits of Land Policies in Ghana

Factorial design statistical techniques have been employed to provide indications of the magnitude of economic benefits associated with the variety of extant land policies in Ghana. Knowledge of the scale of benefits associated with particular land policies or combination of land policies is a vital input for prospective policy decisions. The theoretical basis here is the widely accepted economic theory that the benefits associated with an attribute of a commodity or service is reflected in the unique contributions it makes to the price of the commodity or service. On this score, in this work, each of the different brands of land policies in Ghana was found to be making some unique beneficial contributions to the economy, albeit at varying degrees. The distributive land policy brand emerged as the most beneficial. Distributive land policy empowers the government to compulsorily acquire land parcels, subject to the full payment of compensation , which are subsequently serviced and allocated to private developers -- individuals and institutions for development. This high performance may be ascribed to the substantially unmatched levels of heavy government infrastructure investments and the somewhat superior management of lands within the affected communities by the responsible government departments. At the other end, despite the almost universal veneration of land titling, it was discovered that land titling indeed makes, rather surprisingly, insignificant beneficial contributions. Further evidence discovered was that the benefits produced by the respective policy brands are neither additive nor multiplicative. Actually, in localities in which all the various policies apply concurrently, which is possible in practice, the interactions of the policies nullifies the significance of their respective unique beneficial effects. An important implication from this finding is that extra costs incurred in complying with all the various land policy brands concurrently bring in no independent extra economic benefits. This suggests further that any land policy reform, such as the ongoing land administration project in Ghana, must focus attention on restructuring the existing land formalization arrangements and to rationalize government infrastructure investments in ways that will promote higher benefits from the nation’s land markets.