Comparative Evidence on Urban Land-Use Regulation Bureaucracy in Developing Countries

Abstract

The organization of the chapter is as follows. We present a literature review followed by a description of data. We then assess variation in regulatory bureaucracy around the world. We pay special attention to Brazil and India as they provide a contrast in terms of the relationship between regulation and informality. India imposes notoriously restrictive regulations on urban densities (Bertaud and Brueckner 2005; Sridhar 2010), whereas Brazilian cities are well known for their efforts to incorporate favelas into a more formal system (Maia 1995; Handzic 2010). In the chapter?s last section, we present two sets of statistical associations: one between different aspects of regulatory bureaucracy (those governing construction permits and those governing property registration) and the other between regulation and factors often associated with strict regulations.