In the 1980s the Thai government tried to legalize squatters by issuing special titles that restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997, the author finds that in places where these government titles where issued, leased plots are more likely to be titled than those that are self-cultivated. For these areas, he uses a model to estimate a 6 percent risk premium in the rental rate for untitled plots.

Taking advantage of a historical quasi-experiment in Sri Lanka, this paper provides evidence on the effects of land market restrictions on wages and its spatial pattern. The empirical specification is derived from a general equilibrium model that predicts that the adverse effects of land market restrictions on wages will be less in remote locations. For identification, the study exploits the effects of historical malaria prevalence on the incidence of land restrictions through its effects on "crown land".

The authors use data from Ethiopia to
empirically assess determinants of participation in land
rental markets, compare these to those of administrative
land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact
of households' expectations regarding future
redistribution. Results indicate that rental markets
outperform administrative reallocation in terms of
efficiency and poverty. Households who have part-time jobs

China has undergone a profound economic and social transformation as it moves from a centrally-planned to a market-oriented economy. Land issues are implicated in this ongoing transformation in numerous important ways - as key factors in China's quest for economic growth, national food security and social stability; as important influences in the rapid growth of China's cities as well as the future of its agriculture; and as central features in local government finance and in the growth and stability of the financial and banking sector.

The authors use a large data set from
Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and
transferability to explore determinants of different types
of land-related investment and its possible impact on
productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity
of investment in trees, this is not the case for terraces.
Transfer rights are unambiguously investment-enhancing. The
large productivity effect of terracing implies that, even

There is enough land in the Amazon
region to satisfy Brazilian society's demands for
economic development, environmental management of a resource
base of global importance and the challenges of agrarian
reform. Yet Brazil has been unable to create a fully
coherent and manageable land policy and administration
system for the region which permits sustainable development
goals to be achieved while reconciling special interests and

The extent to which households should be
allowed to transfer their land rights in post-socialist
transition economies is of considerable policy interest. The
authors use data from Vietnam, a transition country that
allows rental and sales of land use rights, to identify
factors conducive to the development of land markets and to
assess the extent to which land transfers enhance productive
efficiency and transfer land to the poor. They find that

This report examines the question of
land titling in Madagascar, a country where modern and
informal tenure systems coexist and overlap to a significant
extent. The report reviews three main arguments for land
titling and their relevance for Madagascar in order to
provide policy implications and evaluations. The first is
that land titling serves as protection against
expropriation. Second, titles may also facilitate land

The decollectivization of agriculture in
Vietnam was a crucial step in the country's transition
to a market economy. But the assignment of land use rights
had to be decentralized, and local cadres ostensibly had the
power to corrupt this process. The authors assess the
realized land allocation against explicit counterfactuals,
including the simulated allocation implied by a competitive
market-based privatization. The authors find that 95-99

This report evaluates the legal
framework for rural land rights, the regulations of rural
housing sites, the effects of land requisition on farmers
who lose land, and some selected issues affecting urban land
rights. The focus of this report is how to enhance property
rights in a number of different contexts. The report makes a
series of specific policy recommendations for rural
agricultural land, rural housing land, to protect rights in

The first paper of this section
(Durand-Laserve) documents how increasing pressures on urban
land and the 'commodification' of shelter and
settlement has increased 'market evictions' of
families holding intermediate tide to property, although
international declarations and pressures have contributed to
reducing 'forced evictions.' The second paper
(Mooya and Cloete) uses the tools of the New Institutional

This report analyzes land issues in Sri
Lanka, which cannot be seen in isolation from the ethnic and
political conflict and, at the same time, even though land
conflict is often linked with the ethnic conflict in Sri
Lanka, a large number of land conflicts in the North and
East can be resolved prior to a full and national political
solution to the ethnic situation. This report analyzes
constraints and opportunities for an effective governance