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;

Using census data from the Censo
Agropecuario 1995-96, the authors map indicators of current
land use, and agricultural productivity across Brazil's
Legal Amazon, These data permit geographical resolution
about ten times finer than afforded by "municipio"
data, used in previous studies. The authors focus on the
extent, and productivity of pasture, the dominant land use
in Amazonia today. Simple tabulations suggest that most

Land is the integrating component of all
livelihoods depending on farm, forest, rangeland, or water
(rivers, lakes, coastal marine) habitats. Due to varying
political, social, and economic factors, the heavy use of
natural resources to supply a rapidly growing global
population and economy has resulted in the unintended
mismanagement and degradation of land and ecosystems. This
book provides strategic focus to the implementation of

This paper presents early evidence from
the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land
formalization program. The study examines the links between
land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a
model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The
demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and
attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel
boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. Consistent with

This report presents the results of a
novel study on land transparency in Vietnam; a study that
focuses on the actual provision of information related to
land. This study was produced as part of the Vietnam
Transparency Project, an effort to systematically measure
transparency, provide actionable advice on how to improve
transparency, and analyze the causes and effects of
transparency in Vietnam. If a country's political,

This note recounts that by the early
2000s, the Government of Mexico and the Secretariat of
Agrarian Reform, in particular, had come to see investment
in "the more dynamic young segment of the population
endowed with more human capital" as the key to
revitalizing the moribund rural economy of the
country's social sector. Approaching this objective
programmatically would entail establishing a land fund from

Mauritania is a vast country covering
over a million square kilometers, where a relatively small
population of 3.5 million people lives on just one-fifth of
the country’s total area. With extremely advanced
desertification, the country is particularly vulnerable to
the impact of climate change and other external shocks. The
main sources of income in Mauritania are agriculture, which
is either irrigated or rain-fed, and livestock. This is

The main focus of this book is land
redistribution. To forge greater consensus among
practitioners of land reform, and to enable them to make
better choices among the many options, the book describes
and analyzes alternative broad paths of implementation,
using examples and the detailed implementation mechanisms
that were used in those examples. The objectives of this
book are to review and analyze: a) the growing consensus on

Evidence is mounting that secure
property rights have positive effects for poor people in
general and women in particular. The aim of this report is
to review what is known about women s access to and control
over land and real property in urban settings, identifying
approaches to strengthening property rights that enhance
women s agency, and sharing key lessons. Section two
synthesizes the evidence on urban women s priorities with

Ensuring food security under changing
climate conditions is one of the major challenges of our
era. Agriculture must not only become increasingly
productive, but must also adapt to climate change while
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Soil carbon
sequestration, the process by which atmospheric carbon
dioxide is taken up by plants through photosynthesis and
stored as carbon in biomass and soils, can support these

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

Since the early 1980s, the Government of
Niger and its development partners have invested more than
200 billion West African Francs (FCFA) in programs will
promote sustainable land management (SLM) and other
activities to reduce poverty and vulnerability. Overall,
more than 50 programs have promoted SLM in Niger. Despite
large investments in SLM programs, their impacts on land
management, agricultural production, poverty, and other