Land Ownership Security and Land Values in Rural Thailand

摘要

The paper reviews the development of formal and informal land rights in Thailand over time and describes the present situation in which a significant amount of land in areas classified as forest reserves is occupied by farmers without legally secured land rights. While the literature on the issue is mostly nonformal, the present paper develops a formal model of farmers' land acquisition, investment, and input decisions assuming credit rationing. The model generates the propositions of the received theory and clarifies the relation between land values, ownership security, productivity, and credit markets. The empirical part of the paper utilizes cross-section land price data to estimate econometrically the value of legal ownership in three provinces of Thailand.