Land rights and the systems that
administer them can vary significantly across the world and
within countries (World Bank 2003). For a number of reasons,
land rights may be unclear or insecure. Securing land rights
plays an important role in driving economic growth and
poverty reduction. In recent years there has been increasing
awareness of the relevance of land tenure issues to food
security, climate change, rapid urbanization, informality,

Economic, agronomic, and biophysical
drivers affect global land use, so all three influences need
to be considered in evaluating economically optimal
allocations of the world's land resources. A dynamic,
forward-looking optimization framework applied over the
course of the coming century shows that although some
deforestation is optimal in the near term, in the absence of
climate change regulation, the desirability of further

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 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 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,

This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by connecting them to regulatory changes in India that affected real property. With this background, the study next quantifies the implications and determinants of factor and output misallocation.

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

As India continues to urbanize and move
towards a less agricultural- and more industry-based
economy, land demands will continue to grow. Its urban
population is expected to increase by more than 200 million
by 2030, requiring 4 to 8 million hectares of land for
residential use alone. Demands for infrastructure and
industry could add a similar amount, summing to total land
demand of 5 to10 percent of the land area currently used for

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

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

Over the last century, the urban spatial
structure of cities has transformed dramatically from the
traditional monocentric configuration to varying forms of
decentralized organization. This paper reviews the theory
and empirical evidence to understand the urban morphology of
jobs and land use within a city. This survey highlights four
broad insights: (i) The evolution of monocentric to
polycentric centers has been accompanied by structural