Recrafting rights over common property resources in Mexico

In this article, we turn to Mexico's recent experience with recrafting property rights over its extensive CPRs as a unique opportunity to analyze in great detail, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the determinants of the endogenous evolution of land rights. It is this endogenous process of division and incorporation that we analyze in this article. Specifically, we want to (1) identify the factors explaining community decisions over changes in property rights (division and incorporation), discriminating in particular among different hypotheses advanced in the literature, and (2) follow the implications of endogenous changes in property rights over individual access to land and how they affect poverty and inequality. We use for this purpose a nationwide panel of ejidos and ejidatarios conducted by the Agrarian Reform Agency, the University of California, Berkeley, and the World Bank. The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In Section II, we use the literature on enclosure of the commons to derive a number of hypotheses for the specification of the empirical analysis of division and incorporation, and, in Section III, we use case studies conducted in 12 ejidos to understand causalities in the changes observed. In Section IV, we present the results from the ejido-level empirical analysis of the decisions to divide and incorporate; in Section V, we analyze the determinants of changes in land endowments at the household level to derive implications for poverty and inequality; and we extract conclusions in Section VI. © 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.