This report gives a description of the financial life of residents with a limited basis for cash-crop and off-farm opportunities, hence restricting them to size of landholding as a critical indicator of wealth and status and influences access to cheap bank finance.The authors demonstrates that the use of informal mechanisms like reciprocal gifts, interest-free lending and borrowing and taking credit in kind from shopkeepers, is widespread and does not decrease with increasing wealth.

Households in developing countries take various actions to smooth income or consumption as a means of managing or responding to risk. This paper examines migration and land rental market participation as responses to risk in rural China.
The authors show that over the last 30 years, there have been significant reforms in China, which have increased labour mobility and the functioning of rural land markets. The authors emphasise that while limitations still remain, the reforms have to date increased the efficiency of the allocation of these important factors of production.

What have we learned about land markets in South Asia about land reform, land fragmentation, sharecropping, security of tenure, farm size, land rights, transaction costs, bargaining power, policy distortions, and market imperfections (including those associated with gender)?Faruqee and Carey review the literature on land markets in South Asia to clarify what's known and to highlight unresolved issues. They report that: We have a good understanding of why sharecropping persists and why it can be superior to other standard agricultural contracts.

This paper addresses the amelioration of the impact of AIDS on land tenure and livelihoods. The author argues that, in Lesotho, land policy development should be informed by the status of community support and welfare for those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. He offers three main policy recommendations as follows: Land administrators should be fully informed about the epidemic and various legislations that govern the rights of the affected households. This will help to ensure uniform implementation of measures to support affected households.

What are the gains from a better education, more land ownership, or a different occupation in Bangladesh? Do the gains differ in urban and rural areas? Have they remained stable over time? Do household size, family structure, and gender affect well-being? Do consumption, poverty, and inequality depend more on characteristics of households or on the areas in which those households are located?Using household data from five successive national surveys, Wodon analyzes the microdeterminants of (and changes in) consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996.

Series of country papers on HIV/AIDS and land in Lesotho, Kenya, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, with concluding paper on methodological and conceptual issues. The key questions addressed include: The impact on and changes in land tenure systems (including patterns of ownership, access, and rights) as a consequence of HIV/AIDS with a focus on vulnerable groups. The ways that HIV/AIDS affected households are coping in terms of land use, management and access, e.g. abandoning land due to fear of losing land, renting out due to inability to utilise land, distress sale of land, etc.

This concept paper proposes (a) market driven farm and off-farm entrepreneurial options, that could take advantage of the existing opportunities, thus leading to the creation of indigenous oriented economic growth and (b) empowerment of the small and medium scale private enterprises to create an enabling environment conducive for equitable growth of their businesses.

Finds that a new system of social stratification is emerging in rural China as a result of economic reforms, that is far less equal than what preceeded it. As part of this trend, wealth inequality has increased, markedly in a short period of time. A relatively equal distribution of land has prevented furher inequality an dblocked the rise of a landed elite.However what has emerged is a "worker elite", mainly concentrated in cooperative enterprises in the coastal provinces and in richer provinces.

This toolkit provides a framework for main-streaming gender in rural development activities.It addresses the lack of conceptual and practical tools in the area of sustainable land management. Its modular design allows for individual approaches and targets development staff at the project and programme levels, with the aim of helping them to find practical ways of dealing with gender issues in rural development activities.

This paper examines the impact of recent changes in the relationship between landowners and tenants in Egypt.

Localization—the growing economic and political power of cities, provinces, and other sub-national entities—will be one of the most important new trends in the 21st century. Together with accelerating globalization of the world economy, localization could revolutionize prospects for human development or it could lead to chaos and increased human suffering.Improved communications, transportation and falling trade barriers are not only making the world smaller they are also fueling the desire and providing the means for local communities to shape their own future.

This CMI working paper provides an overview of rural-urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa outlining the major strands of contemporary academic debates on this issue. There author identifies two interrelated debates for discussion. The first is about the historiography of migrancy, predominantly in Southern and Eastern Africa; the other one is about the relationship between research on labour migration and the policy prescriptions that ostensibly follow.The author goes on to draw some tentative conclusions about what might be the implications of these debates for urban workers in Kenya.