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al to urban areas, and this leads to further insecurityand overcrowding.Legal access to property rights for various groupsis clearly an over-arching and universal issuethat should be at the centre of global efforts toempower the poor; but it has in fact received verylittle coherent analysis to date. To unpack therelationship between poverty and property rightswe must understand that it is these rights thatprovide the basis for economic growth. The globaleconomy grew very slowly until the beginning ofthe 19 th Century. Before then, and for thousandsof years, notes Jeffrey Sachs, ‘there had beenvirtually no sustained economic growth in theworld’. 14 However, with the advent of the industrialrevolution and economic expansion, assetsexpanded and property rights evolved. Slowly theidea of private property ownership came to underpineconomic development in the West. Whilesocial, economic and political stability was upsetby two World Wars and the Great Depression, theGI Bill of Rights in the United States, the MarshallPlan and the incipient economic and politicalunion in Europe, and rapid development inEast Asia supported the growth of a middle-classthat led to further consolidation of legal propertysystems in these regions. The transformation frompredominantly extralegal property systems to formalproperty rights entrenched in law has sincecome to support functioning market economiesand polities.The Building Blocks of the PropertySystemThis transition has reduced global poverty substantially,but as outlined above, billions of peoplearound the world still lack secure propertyrights, which hinders their economic, politicaland social security. In order to examine how povertycan best be relieved, and why access to propertyrights is fundamental to the empowermentof the poor, it is necessary to identify buildingblocks of a fully-functional property system. Sucha system operates in the following four ways:1) As a system of rules that defines the bundleof rights and obligations between people andassets. 15 Property ownership creates ties thatbind individual citizens together through theformation of networks of economic and legalrights and corresponding obligations. Thecredible enforcement of these rights and obligationsrequires a judicial mechanism thatallows for equitable, transparent and efficientdispute resolution.2) As a system of governance. Property systemsare a central facet of state functionality, andas such are an important measurement of fiduciaryand administrative effectiveness. Theinstitutional order of the state is based ontechnical rules and relationships which defineinteractions between stakeholders, rangingfrom direct ownership of land to promulgationof rules that govern security of land andhouse tenure, land planning, zoning, taxingand other aspects of property management.Technological innovation, which has radicallyreduced the cost of information, has generatedthe possibility for further transparency and accountabilityin property systems as an instrumentof governance.3) As a functioning market for the exchange ofassets. A fully functional property system allowsland, houses, moveable property, equityshares, and ideas to be transformed into assetsto be bought and sold at rates determinedby market forces. This subjects the exchangeof property to a level of transparency and accountability,and allows for the developmentof financial mechanisms — including credit66