SA’s global property rights ranking slumps 15 places
SOUTH Africa has slumped 15 places to 37th in the latest global property rights rankings, the largest drop by any country.
The country was ranked 22nd globally and first in Africa last year in the International Property Rights Index compiled by the Washington-based Property Rights Alliance (PRA), which was released in partnership with the Free Market Foundation of South Africa.
South Africa’s score declined this year by 0.65 points to 6.35 points from 7 points last year on a grading scale where the highest possible grading is 10 points.
The deterioration in the score and ranking followed the adoption of a resolution on expropriation of property without compensation at the ANC’s elective conference in December, that led to Cyril Ramaphosa being elected president of the ANC and subsequently becoming president of the country.
Finland led the latest ranking list with a score of 8.6924 points, followed by New Zealand, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, Japan, Denmark, UK, US and Austria.
The US for the first time fell from being first in the world for intellectual property protections to second behind Finland, which also passed New Zealand to become first in the index overall. The index measured the strength of physical property rights, intellectual property rights and the legal and political environments that contain them in 125 countries around the world. It serves as a barometer for the status of property rights, ranking strengths and protection of both physical and intellectual property rights in these countries.
The top 15 countries in the rankings last year and this year remained the same, but in a slightly different order.
Five African countries were ranked in the bottom 10 countries in the latest index. The 10 lowest ranked countries were Haiti, Yemen, Venezuela, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Burundi, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
The PRA said 6-billion people worldwide suffered from inadequate protection of their property rights.
Only 758 million people, 13 percent of the world population, enjoyed adequate protections for their artistic works, inventions, and private property, it said.
The PRA report included a case study on South Africa titled Pursuing Property Titles for Low Income Households in South Africa compiled by Jessica Canada, a PhD student in Economics at the University of Virginia in the US and Jason Urbach, a director of the Free Market Foundation (FMF).
It referred to the FMF initiated Khaya Lam project in 2010, which aimed to bring about the titling of all the apartheid-era properties in which black families had and still had occupation rights, but not title deeds.
It said a title deed was a profound game changer for millions of South Africa’s poorest citizens and a tangible asset against which they could borrow money, earn rental income and begin to change their family’s socio-economic circumstances.