Transition countries provide a natural experiment to study the development of land markets. This paper provides survey-evidence of the variation in the development of land markets, identifies a series of patterns, and provides a set of hypotheses to explain these variations in land market development.

Agriculture - Crops & Crop Management Systems Poverty Reduction - Rural Poverty Reduction Environment - Environmental Economics & Policies Climate Change Poverty Reduction - Poverty Monitoring & Analysis

It would appear that the English common law was grafted onto Ghanaian communal societies without taking into account the differences between the early nineteenth-century capitalist economic structures and the egalitarian communal institutions of Ghana. Both systems of law reflect distinctively different economic structures. That oversight laid the foundations for the conflicts between the customary law and practice and the Anglo-American common law, its notions and conceptions of tenure.

Public Sector Economics Public Sector Management and Reform Banks and Banking Reform Urban Development - Municipal Housing and Land Rural Development - Common Property Resource Development Finance and Financial Sector Development Public Sector Development

The paper investigates the conflicting findings in empirical studies linking land productivity to plot size, livestock ownership, investment in farm assets, and land improvement practices. The conflicting impacts found are partly as a result of different model specifications, the type of data used – panel or cross sectional data – and possibly due to imperfections in rural markets. We control for these problems using household and plot level panel data from rural farmers in Uganda. We find that ownership of cattle has a negative and significant impact on land productivity.

This paper proposes to fill the important gap in reliable and nationally representative land tenure data by including a Land Tenure Module (LTM) to be linked to multi-purpose household surveys such as the Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS). Developing survey standards to generate globally comparable land data is important for generating data to be used in global and regional land governance monitoring initiatives (SDGs; LPI – UNECA; GLTN/ GLII; VGGT).

Using an economy-wide conceptual framework, the author analyzes how land registration affects financial development and economic growth in Thailand. He uses contemporary techniques, such as error correction and co-integration, to deal with such problems as time-series data not being stationary. He also uses the auto-regressive distributed lag model to analyze long lags in output response to changes in land registration. His key findings: 1) Land titling has significant positive long-run effects on financial development.

Does the distribution of land rights affect the choice of contractible techniques? I present evidence suggesting that Nicaraguan farmers are more likely to grow effort-intensive crops on owned rather than on rented plots. I consider two theoretical arguments that illustrate why property rights might matter. In the first the farmer is subject to limited liability; in the second the owner cannot commit to output-contingent contracts. In both cases choices might be inefficient regardless of land distribution. The efficiency loss, however, is lower when the farmer owns the land.

There is widespread agreement on the need for land reform in Zimbabwe as a means of reducing poverty. This paper assesses the potential consequences of a land-reform scheme that draws on proposals from Zimbabwe's government in 1998 and 1999. The authors analyze the impact of the reform on resettled farm households and as a development project for which they conduct cost-benefit analysis. The analysis, which considers costs and benefits during a 15-year period, relies on a set of models of family farms that are typical of those that would benefit from land redistribution.

The obtaining of quantitative data for economic analysis of changes in the agricultural use of land has been a problem in recent years. Field study is a slow and expensive method of providing information. Usually, it requires several experienced persons to collect the data needed. The airphoto interpretation method described in this article supplies suitable data for economic studies with considerable savings in time and cost. With this method, a minimum of personnel is needed.

Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors purchasing (or leasing) land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. If land deals are to be beneficial they need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly provided (infrastructure, agronomic knowledge), and some can only be provided by ‘pioneer’ investors who discover what works and who create demonstration effects.

Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions have been covered substantially in recent literature. Despite the wealth of theoretical and empirical studies on this subject, there is no study that has reviewed existing literature in light of concerns over sustainable and equitable management. This chapter fills the gap by analyzing and synthesizing available literature to put some structure on existing knowledge. The paper has a threefold contribution to the literature. First, it takes stock of what we know so far about the determinants of land grab.