The significance of informal land registration in property transactions and development has been discussed at length, but there are few examples of in-depth case studies of how this information accessing and collection institution relates to them and how it may create property rights. This paper examines the nature and operation of non-governmental and voluntary land transaction registration practices in Kowloon Walled City, an ideal example of a privately-planned and developed habitat under unclear property rights due to jurisdictional disputes between China and Britain and no state protection of property rights or intervention in building control existed. Based on documentary evidence interpreted from a Coasian and Hayekian stance, it advances the proposition that the contracts the Kowloon Walled City Kaifong Welfare Promotion Association (hereafter the Kaifong Association) sought to represent as a witness built up its political credibility as a representative body. Such a role not only reduced transaction costs of contract enforcement and, hence, facilitated redevelopment, but also became that of a quasi-government land registrar due to the popularity of its witnessing service, which, under specific circumstances, served as the basis for the assignment of de jure private property rights by the state. It was a good example of Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong (Jones 2011: p.270, quoting Xu Jiatun, Head of the Xinhua News Agency) Keywords Witness, land contract, informal land registration, unclear property rights, transaction cost 1 Jones (2011), for instance, did not disclose what confidential materials he got in Touch as a District Officer due to conflict of interest. Bristow's (1984) classic work on local land-use planning covered prewar planning for the KWC, but was constrained by data access to postwar confidential files. When Wesley-Smith researched for his 1973 paper and approached government, he was not given confidential or secret information.
This interdisciplinary paper, informed by research and practices in neo-institutional economics, property law and land surveying, is an exploratory account of the boundary as (a) the ontological foundation of private property in land and boundary dispute resolution, and (b) as a pre-contractual condition of any Coasian exchange of rights for planned urban development and space-relevant innovations. Under conditions of positive transaction costs according to the third Coase Theorem, with the help of real-life examples, the paper explains the choice of using the courts, instead of the market, as a means of resolving disputes over land boundaries. It does so in terms of two land surveying and three economic reasons. The surveying reasons are historical and cartographical. The economics reasons relate to the price level of land, the transaction costs of enforcing dispute resolutions and the externalities of land boundary determination.
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