This book examines issues at the
forefront of the debate on land law reform, pays particular
attention to how reform options affect the poor and
disadvantaged, and recommends strategies for alleviating
poverty more effectively through land law reform. It reviews
the role of the World Bank in land law reform, examining
issues of process as well as substance. It also identifies
key challenges and directions, and stresses the need to

Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of
a land tenure regularization program covering the entire
country allows the use of administrative data to describe
initial performance and combine the data with household
surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent
transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In
2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between
5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent

This paper pilots an approach to
identifying, categorizing, and mapping public land owned by
the central, state, and local government in urban developed
areas of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. The methodology uses
information on plot sizes, location, and ownership that is
publicly available for all areas covered by town planning
schemes. The study examines the extent of unutilized and
underutilized public land, which excludes all cemeteries,

The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural
commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about
investors causing a "global land rush". Large land
deals can provide opportunities for better access to
capital, transfer of technology, and advances in
productivity and employment generation. But they carry risks
of dispossession and loss of livelihoods, corruption,
deterioration in local food security, environmental damage,

The 2007/08 commodity price boom
triggered a ‘rush’ for land in developing countries. Yet,
many affected countries lacked the regulatory infrastructure
to cope with such demand and reliable data on investors’
performance. This study uses the example of Ethiopia to show
how simple improvements in administrative data collection
can help to address this by (i) allowing assessment of the
productivity of land use and taking measures to increase it;

The regionally unique constitution of
the Republic of Vanuatu provides that-all land in Vanuatu
belongs to custom owners and their descendants and that
the-rule of custom shall form the basis of ownership and use
of land. Implementing this principle, however, after decades
of land alienation by foreigners using alien laws has proven
to be challenging. Concerns over actual and perceived
problems of land alienation through leasing in Vanuatu

South Sudan is a new country of 10.5
million people that has just emerged from conflict and still
facing challenges with recovery and development. Although
economic disparities, political exclusion and deprivation in
the distribution of political and economic power between the
northern and southern parts of then united Sudan were often
tendered as the proximal causes of the conflict, at the
center of the prolonged civil war was the struggle for

The purpose of this report is to review
and assess Afghanistan's legal framework regulating
social safeguards (national and local laws, regulations,
procedures and policies) with special reference to the law
and practice of compulsory land acquisition, or
expropriation. The overall objective of the report is to
consider how Afghanistan's legal framework would
address social safeguard issues in upcoming World Bank

This paper uses mirror statistics and
research in the field to estimate the magnitude of
Tunisia's informal trade with Libya and Algeria. The
aim is to assess the scale of this trade and to evaluate the
amount lost in taxes and duties as a result as well as to
assess the local impact in terms of income generation. The
main findings show that within Tunisian trade as a whole,
informal trade accounts for only a small share (5 percent of

Albania's radical farmland
distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis
and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it
led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient,
and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to
lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This
paper uses farm-level data from the 2005 Albania Living
Standards Measurement Survey to explore this quantitatively.

Land markets play a limited role in
subsistence economies with low skill-intensity of
agricultural cultivation, equally distributed land
endowments and little movement out of agriculture to join
the non-farm economy. But, as the economy starts to
diversify, the scope for efficiency-enhancing land transfers
beyond immediate kin and for longer than just one season
assumes significantly greater importance. Lease markets can

The present study reports on the
Government of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau's efforts
to develop a comprehensive strategy for enhancing land
rights security and achieving social and economic
development objectives. This report is divided into two main
parts. The first part summarizes the current state of
development of the government s land policy, as well as the
legal and traditional framework existing for land tenure