Land policy, administration and
management are areas of strong client demand for technical
advice and operational support. This review sought to help
the Bank better position itself to present coherent advice
on policy, institutional arrangements and practice. The
potential implications are a lowering of reputational risk
to the Bank; greater efficiency in the process including
joint data gathering; and building of greater momentum and

Myanmar is going through a critical transformation
in its development path - from isolation and
fragmentation to openness and integration; and
from pervasive state control, exclusion, and individual
disengagement, to inclusion, participation,
and empowerment. This dual shift is happening
against a backdrop of broader political reforms that
started in 2011 when a new administration took office.
The country’s transition after the planned elections in
2015 will be a major test of the progress on political

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.

In 2013 the World Bank set itself two
ambitious goals: to end extreme poverty within a generation
and to boost the prosperity of the bottom 40 percent of the
population worldwide. In Latin America, the significance of
both goals cannot be overstated. Indigenous people account
for about 8 percent of the population, but represent 14
percent of the poor and over 17 percent of all Latin
Americans living on less than United States (U.S.) $2.50 a

The purpose of this study was to augment
the Bank's research on land markets and investigate key
land market issues in four case study cities in South and
East Asia. From the study results, the consultants have
attempted to determine whether or not certain policy
instruments can be adopted in the respective cities and in
other regions of the world. Ultimately the study, in tracing
the role of various land development policies in these

In India, as in many developing
countries, land continues to have enormous economic, social,
and symbolic relevance. How access to land can be obtained,
and how ownership of land can be documented, are questions
essential to the livelihoods of the large majority of the
poor, especially in rural and tribal areas. Answers to these
questions will determine to what extent India's
increasingly scarce natural resources are managed. Moreover,

Low export prices and high production
costs are contributing to a persistent deficit in the
external accounts. Despite narrowing somewhat in recent
years, Zimbabwe’s current account deficit remains much
larger than those of comparable countries in the region, and
exports currently amount to just over half of imports. A
decline in global prices for gold, platinum and other
mineral commodities, coupled with unresolved supply-side

As the world is urbanizing, many cities
are grappling with a population that is growing rapidly,
thereby increasing demand for land and housing. This
pressure on land and housing markets often is exacerbated by
inappropriate or inadequate policies. The result is a supply
of well-located land and housing that falls well short of
demand and the proliferation of poorly serviced informal
settlements, many of which are located far from jobs, city

On December 26 2004, a 9.3 magnitude
earthquake struck the Indian Ocean and unleashed a blast of
energy, creating a tsunami three stories high. The disaster
which claimed more than 228,000 lives had an impact on the
lives of more than 2.5 million people causing close to US$
11.4 billion of damage in 14 countries. The highest price
was paid in Aceh, which had the greatest death toll of
130,000 confirmed dead and a further 37,000 reported

Despite its rapid growth in recent
decades, GDP per capita in India remains at a relatively low
level by international standards, and the country continues
to be marked by large subnational disparities in levels of
well-being. These large disparities naturally lead to
interest in India’s spatial landscape of potential for
economic development. Against this backdrop, this paper
presents the results of an analysis of underlying variations

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

When it comes to strategy, the Chinese
have a saying: 'think big, start small, but move
fast.' This has been our guiding philosophy for the
pilot land reforms of the World Bank-Department of
International Development (DFID) sub national Investment
Climate Program (ICP) in Nigeria. The challenge was to find
a 'small' reform entry point from which to
'move fast' on this sensitive and difficult topic,