PRIndex: A Global Indicator of Citizens' Perceptions of Property Rights

Malcolm Childress
Co-Founder and Executive Director, Land Alliance

&

David Spievack
Lead Research Architect for PRIndex, Land Alliance

NCAER is organizing first of its 2018 seminars on “PRIndex”, a global indicator of citizens’ perceptions of the security of property rights, with Malcolm Childress, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Land Alliance, Inc., and David Spievack, Lead Research Architect for PRIndex, also at Land Alliance.  PRIndex aims to fill the information gap about individual perceptions of property rights by creating a baseline global dataset to support the achievement of secure property rights around the world.

Property rights are a cornerstone of both economic development and social justice. However, there is no well-established methodology to-date to measure and reasonably compare property rights as perceived by citizens over time and across countries. Building on initial pilot data collected from nine countries including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Greece, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Peru and Tanzania in 2016 and 2017, PRIndex plans to collect data from an additional 36 countries across the world in 2018, creating the world’s first comprehensive account of people’s perceptions and opinions of property rights. The presentation will recapitulate the history of PRIndex, discuss results from its most recent round of testing in India, Tanzania, and Colombia, and share current plans and timelines for 2018.

PRIndex is an initiative supported by the Omidyar Network and DFID, the UK Department for International Development, and implemented by Land Alliance in association with Gallup, Inc.  Land Alliance is a think-and-do tank that tests new approaches to defining and managing rights, shares expertise and best practices globally, and supports groups working to scale the solution of land issues. It works to find solutions to the complex development challenges of cities, rural landscapes and forests by aligning local, national and international resources.

Malcolm Childress is an economist and land administration specialist with 30 years of experience working with land tenure and property rights systems. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Land Alliance and co-director of the Global Property Rights Index initiative with the Open Data Institute. He was Senior Land Administration and Policy Specialist in the World Bank from 2003-2014, and previously a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Land Tenure Center.  He has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

David Spievack is Lead Research Architect, PRIndex. He has 25 years of market research experience in Japan and the United States, leading market research and analytics and a number of multinational research initiatives at both PayPal and VISA. Since leaving VISA in 2015, David has been a research and strategy consultant for a number of for-profit, non-profit, and impact investing firms. In addition to supporting the property rights team at Omidyar Network, David has written on multiple subjects, including the preconditions and drivers of empowerment, privacy and informed consent, resilience theory, systems thinking, and anti-establishment politics in the United States. He received his BA, MA and MPhil in History from Columbia University.