This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 21st, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

Tim Hensstadt is the president of the Rural Development Institute which works to eliminate

poverty worldwide. Key to his work, reforming land rights.

Hansstadt says a lack of land rights affects half the world's rural families,

some 230 million households,

and landlessness has aggravated poverty, social unrest, and environmental degradation.

Mr. Hanstand spoke at the Cato Policy Forum entitled

Giving Land Rights to the world's poor.

It was held July 31st.

Land rights are recognized as fairly important in economic development circles, but governments, as you pointed out out are being very slow to adopt reforms that

would secure these types of rights. Why is that?

Land and property rights is often controversial or at least perceived as controversial.

Land means power, anything to affect the status quo,

can be difficult, can be challenging, and can be controversial.

Economists in the 19th and 20th centuries didn't really emphasize the importance of property rights and making their arguments.

Why do you think that is?

I think they assumed property rights.

Economists often assumed things.

They assumed property rights existed and coming from developed country settings

there often were property rights. They did not recognize the institutions that were underlied those property rights

in developed country settings and that those institutions were missing in many developing

country settings.

...