THE ALBANIAN LAND RIGHTS SECURITY PERCEPTION AND FACTORS INFLUENCING IT

This study aims to analyze the main obstacles that hamper the development of agricultural land mobility and investment incentives in agriculture land, mainly in conjunction to agriculture land rights property. There were interviewed 621 farms (households – HH) that possess 2,529 land plots, from different parts of Albania, representing different types of agriculture land distribution and land use. The interviewed farmers state that they perceive property rights of 20% of the plots as unsecure. Property insecurity perception tends to be related to the form of the land acquisition – it is higher among farmers who received their land through the implementation of the Law 7501 (thus, that did not own that land before communism), as compared to farmers who got “father’s land”, that was owned by them (or their ancestors) before WW2 (land distribution was done according to community will, respecting old property boundaries). The clash among customary and legal institutions for land tenure in the villages (former land rights by inheritance and new land rights distributed by Law 7501) is also a cause of social tensions in rural communities, which in some cases are associated with heavy consequences. Conflicts per se also influence further in the land security perception in the villages.