In a forthcoming paper, Harvard's Lakshmi Iyer and Quy-Toan rebut Hernando de Soto's argument that the major barrier to prosperity is the inability to convert property into usable assets.
Using household-level surveys taken before and after the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam, the authors find "no evidence that [11 million] land titles increased access to credit on the part of rural household, neither were they significant determinants of land market activity."
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