In the 1980s, the World Bank was zeroing in on one of the driving forces behind poor economic growth in the developing world: insecure land ownership. In other words, there was no centralized database of who owned any given property, which made it difficult to buy or sell land, or use it to get credit. And it’s hard to tax land when you don’t know who owns it. Ideally, countries would have cadastres, public databases that register the location, ownership, and value of land. A good cadastral system makes the buying and selling of land, as well as the collection of taxes, easy. When you buy a
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