Karol Boudreaux is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University. She has led specialized research on land tenure and property rights, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa for USAID, and served on the Working Group on Property Rights of the U.N.’s Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. Boudreaux is now in her first semester teaching Developmental Economics for the Washington Hillsdale Internship Program at the Allen P. Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship.
What made you decide to teach this semester?
I have known about Hillsdale for a long time, and through work that my husband and I did when he was president of the Foundation for Economic Education, we would often invite Professor of History Burt Folsom to give lectures to the students. They were always fabulous lectures, and really made a tremendous contribution to the work that we were trying to do explaining the economic history of the United States.
I went out to Hillsdale last year and gave a lecture on African economic development. After that, Professor Wolfram contacted folks here and suggested that if they had an economic development course, it might be good to have me involved with that. I was really pleased by that.
How did you first become interested in economics?
I went to a law and economics law school – the University of Virginia – so there was a very heavy emphasis in our coursework on an economic understanding of the law. So, how does economics help us interpret what’s going on in the legal environment. Unlike people in a lot of law schools, we actually read quite a lot of economics. At first I thought it was a little bit off-putting — I wasn’t in law school to learn economics — but I pretty quickly figured out that it really helped you understand a lot about the world and people’s behavior. Economics helps you understand everyday decision making and the lives of everyday people.
How did you first start at USAID?
When I was at George Mason, I had the opportunity to be involved in a project called Enterprise-Based Solutions to Poverty. What we were doing in that project was looking for examples in Africa of approaches or entrepreneurs who were addressing tough challenges, but doing it using the market.
One of the main constraints that all these entrepreneurs faced was real insecurity over their property rights. They might start a business, but it would be difficult for them to grow the business because either they didn’t have access to land they needed to grow the business, or their other property — their moveable property and their intangible property — was going to be subject to taxation, or almost expropriation from the government. Successful people can become targets in some countries. I saw that property was a real constraining factor to growth in poor countries. That was an interesting puzzle to me: Why had poor countries not solved the property problem?
So I started thinking about the role that land plays in creating a foundation for economic development and the role that property more broadly plays in promoting human flourishing. I was asked to come work for USAID because they were interested in having some of that thinking in their programing.
How often do you go to Africa, and what do you typically do when you’re there?
Since 2005, when the market-based solutions project started, I’ve gone a couple of times a year.
I’ve spent most of my time in East and Southern Africa. When I was at AID, I was working with the U.S. Government to develop programs that were designed to give people in the country more secure property rights.
Sometimes I go to do research. Toward the end of this semester, I’ll be going back to support a USAID project that’s using cell phone technology to map and record land rights. It’s a way to lower the cost of recording land rights and making land rights more secure for people. It’s also a way to get those rights more quickly because with this technology, local people can do the mapping themselves — they don’t need to rely on surveyors.
Usually I’m there to do research to understand a problem, or to work on designing programs to give people more secure property rights.
Do you plan on teaching at Hillsdale for another semester?
I’m delighted to have the opportunity to teach at Hillsdale, and if the opportunity arose again, I would love to. It’s a great set of students, and I’ve had nothing but a warm welcome.
– Compiled by Vivian Hughbanks