The inefficacy of land titling programs: homesteading in Haiti, 1933–1950

One of the most common policy recommendations in developing countries is titling land. Yet, titling programs around the developing world frequently fail to produce many titles. We try to understand these failures by exploring a titling program in Haiti in the 1930s. The program offered tenants renting public land an opportunity to privatize the land as a homestead, giving them an official title and ending rental payments. Making use of archival data on all homesteads granted in the first 16 years, we find the program created fewer than 700 homesteads. We discuss potential reasons for the program’s failure and argue that it failed because it required homesteaders to farm at least 50% of the plot in cash crops. We discuss whether this requirement was the government’s attempt to extract revenues from the land in the absence of other options or whether it was an intentional barrier to resist foreign interference.