The authors examine the impact of land
reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to
exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their
land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase
the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term
investments on the part of households. Their
difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes
advantage of the variation across provinces in the issuance

This note summarizes the key findings of
the attached consultant report. India is still primarily a
rural, agrarian economy in which land use and land rights
are an emotional issue. Prior to 1990 the presumption was
that only residual land (non agricultural) would be made
available for industrial use and because the state was the
principal industrial investor the state would acquire any
land needed. After 1990 the expectation was that private

Secure property rights are considered a
key determinant of economic development. However, evaluation
of the causal effects of land titling is a difficult task.
Since 2004, the Brazilian government, through a program
called "Papel Passado," has issued titles to more
than 85,000 families and has the goal to reach 750,000.
Another topic in public policy that is crucial for
developing economies is child labor force participation. In

While liberalizing key factor markets is
a crucial step in the transition from a socialist
control-economy to a market economy, the process can be
stalled by imperfect information, high transaction costs,
and covert resistance from entrenched interests. The authors
study land-market adjustment in the wake of Vietnam's
reforms aiming to establish a free market in land-use rights
following de-collectivization. Inefficiencies in the initial

The report, Land Tenure for Social and
Economic Inclusion in Yemen: Issues and Opportunities was
completed in December 2009. The report addresses the
problems of land ownership in Yemen and the various social
and economic problems associated with the system of land
ownership. Property rights under Yemeni Law are expressed
both in custom and statute, but both are informed by shari a
(Islamic law), which provides the basic property categories

Although early attempts at land titling
in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights
in view of increased demand for land, options for
registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights
under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by
combining information technology with participatory methods
have led to renewed interest. This paper uses a
difference-in-difference approach to assess economic impacts

The authors develop a model of land
leasing with agents characterized by unobserved
heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor
market. In this case, decentralized land rental may
contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have
several advantages over administrative reallocation. The
extent to which this is true empirically is explored using
data from three of China's poorest provinces. The

This study aims to assess the extent to
which reforms have actually been implemented, the impact
they have had on the rural population, and the challenges
which, as a consequence, need to be addressed by the new
administration. This report is organized as follows: Section
1 describes Mexico's rural economy. It reviews the
broad context of macro, trade, and sector-level reforms, the
strengths and weaknesses of both the productive and

Although many African countries have
recently adopted highly innovative and pro-poor land laws,
lack of implementation thwarts their potentially
far-reaching impact on productivity, poverty reduction, and
governance. The authors use a representative household
survey from Ethiopia where, over a short period,
certificates to more than 20 million plots were issued to
describe the certification process, explore its incidence

The goal of this report is to take stock
of the existing evidence on the impact of the Comprehensive
Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) on poverty, to examine the
current challenges that an extension of CARP would face, and
to suggest directions toward achieving progress on land
reform given the financial and policy constraints faced by
the program. The report starts by examining the nature and
relevance of the challenges that an extension of the land

The authors review the role of land
policies in the evolving farm structure of transition
countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). They show how
different policies for land property rights, degrees of
control of land rental and sale markets, and procedures for
restructuring former collective or state farms resulted in
significantly different farm structures in CEE countries

In India, land continues to be of
enormous economic, social, and symbolic relevance. The main
purpose of this report is to review new empirical evidence
on land administration and land policy, as well as the
possible interaction between the two, to derive policy
conclusions. The empirical basis for the discussion of land
administration is provided by a review of land records,
survey and settlement, and land registration in 14 states.