Allocating land for people to use is one of the most powerful tools a government can have. A newly published study by an MIT scholar now identifies the extent to which state land distribution can be a politically charged act. The research, focused on Kenya in recent decades, challenges some conventional wisdom while bringing new empirical data to the subject. To explain the “property rights gap” in some countries — in which people do not own the land they work on — numerous scholars have concluded that many nation-states are…
