Land grabbing is a form of dispossession whereby an actor with large-scale capital acquires a vast area of land and, in the process, alienates the former local rulers of the land. Agricultural land...Show moreLand grabbing is a form of dispossession whereby an actor with large-scale capital acquires a vast area of land and, in the process, alienates the former local rulers of the land. Agricultural land grabs exploded during the 2007/08 global financial crisis and the concurrent commodity, food, and energy crises. A pervasive phenomenon ever since, land grabs are directly associated with negative micro-economic, environmental, and social outcomes. Although global structural causes to land grabbing are well known, there is a stark lack of research on its national-level determinants. Therefore, this thesis investigates the relationship between countries’ private property security and the magnitude of land grabbing they experience through a large-N, cross-sectional research design. The main hypothesis, captured by the idea of ‘institution shopping’, is that large-scale capital investors will prefer countries with secure property rights regimes, leading to higher land grabbing magnitude. The methodology utilised is a multivariate ordinary least squares regression model which uses all transnational agricultural land grabs recorded in the Land Matrix database from 2008 to 2017 for Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Beyond private property security, four other predictors are included in the model: forest land cover, percentage of external debt, an indicator of food insecurity, and an indicator of financial market development. The model finds no correlation between private property security and land grabbing magnitude. Moreover, only the control for food insecurity finds evidence of statistical correlation. Due to the complexity of the phenomenon and issues of data incompleteness, the national-level determinants behind land grabbing cannot be determined with the model tested in this thesis.Show less