This paper synthesizes and extends the results of urban land market studies carriedout in three Brazilian cities ? Brasília, Curitiba and Recife. The purpose of thestudies is to empirically assess the performance of urban land markets in differentcities and to gauge the feasibility of applying the Land Market Assessmentmethodology in Brazil.

The mechanism adopted to keep the rise in property prices under check until 2000 was the active participation of the public sector in keeping supply ahead of demand. This seems to have worked well in keeping property prices under control and meeting the housing requirements of the middle and high-income groups living in NCT Delhi. The EWS and lower income stratum, however, faced a shortage. This, along with flexibility in unauthorized construction regarding plot size, etc., explains the huge growth in unauthorized construction.

Unequal and insecure access to land undermind women's farm productivity, limit employment options, depress their earnings, and degrade the environment. Factors limiting women's access to land include legal discrimination, land scarcity, inappropriate government policies, and lack of political power and social status. Policies to promote sustainalbe development rather than focusing on family planning, as is commonly done, should directly support women's economic activities.

International Development, Land Economics/Use,

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe.

Russia has experienced dramatic changes in land ownership and tenure since 1991: agricultural land has been largely privatized, individual landowners now have legal rights to most agricultural land in the country, and prohibitions on buying and selling of land have been recently removed. The necessary pre-conditions for the development of agricultural land markets have been met and we are beginning to witness transactions that involve individual landowners, and not only the state.

Belarus has preserved its third position in Registering Property in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2014 report. Constant improvement of property registration procedures has allowed Belarus to achieve that. The Registering Property indicator takes into account three factors: the number of procedures required to transfer rights to property, the time spent on completing all the necessary procedures and the cost of procedures. From ”The Earth Summit“ in Brazil 1992 sustainable development recognized by almost all societies as one of the major global goals.

Africa's biofuel potential over the last ten years has increasingly attracted foreign investors’ attention. We estimate the determinants of foreign investors land demand for biofuel production in SSA, using Poisson specifications of the gravity model. Our estimates suggest that land availability, abundance of water resources and weak land governance are significant determinants of large-scale land acquisitions for biofuel production.

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe.

Research on credit markets from developing economies, as well as work on the origin of institutions in general, has suggested that land inequality may play a role in determining financial development. In this paper we establish empirically that initial land inequality is a significant predictor of financial depth across countries, even while controlling for other predictors such as legal origin, ethnic fractionalization, and income inequality.

Paper removed January 20, 2017 at the request of the author. Community/Rural/Urban Development, Land Economics/Use,