Belarus has preserved its third position in Registering Property in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2014 report. Constant improvement of property registration procedures has allowed Belarus to achieve that. The Registering Property indicator takes into account three factors: the number of procedures required to transfer rights to property, the time spent on completing all the necessary procedures and the cost of procedures. From ”The Earth Summit“ in Brazil 1992 sustainable development recognized by almost all societies as one of the major global goals.

Land Economics/Use,

While most studies looking at the consequences of tenurial insecurity on land markets in developing countries focus on the effects of tenurial insecurity on the investment behavior of landowners, this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and contract choice in land tenancy.

After the Doi Moi (‘renovation’) reforms in Vietnam from 1986, land ownership rules were adjusted, effectively terminating former land collectivisation efforts. While land ownership remained fully under the control of the state, a 1993 land law conferred 20-year leaseholds to most farmers. They could now utilize farm land individually, and sell, swap and mortgage the land in a situation similar to private ownership. These leaseholds are now expiring and a new 2013 land law is in the making.

The paper discusses the recent developments of FDI in land in developing countries. Three issues are analyzed: the first is the available evidence on the so called “land grab” and the associated question of the role of control on land in the internationalisation of developing countries agricultural production. The focus is on multinational enterprises in agriculture, although analysis of shifting FDI strategies requires value chain considerations. The second issue is the problem of the risks of such large land deals in the context of complex and insecure land rights.

Despite the implementation of Bolivia's land reform in 1953, the agrarian structure continues to have an extreme concentration of land. Furthermore, in the last two decades regional agrarian structure have been aggravated by population pressures and a lack of new technological practices for most small scale farmers and peasants. Public and private institutions and urban residents observe hundreds of landless and near-landless families in the cities searching for jobs. Most end up becoming part of the growing unemployed labor force in the urban sector.

The dominant paradigm of conservation-reserve planning in economics is to optimize the provision of physical conservation benefits (measured in units like species protected) given a budget constraint. Large-scale biology-based priority setting implies that the value we place on biodiversity and ecosystem function is not affected by human proximity to that natural capital. There is significant evidence, however, that human willingness to pay (WTP) for conservation declines with distance (e.g. Loomis 2000) – a phenomenon we refer to as “spatial value decay”.

Farmers' ability to leave agriculture is an important and debated topic in China and other countries. Many scholars believe China's unique land tenure policies prevent farmers from leaving agriculture. This paper examines the hypothesis that China's land tenure system deters exit from agriculture using household level data from Northeast China. Farm Management, Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use,

Urban Development - Urban Housing National Urban Development Policies and Strategies Public Sector Management and Reform Communities and Human Settlements - Urban Housing and Land Settlements Transport Economics Policy and Planning Public Sector Development Transport

Systems thinking is a tool that can be used by faculty to facilitate the exercise of integration while promoting critical thinking in the classroom, which is hypothesized to improve student learning. This paper describes a pilot study undertaken in 2003 in an undergraduate economics course. The paper reflects on the experiences incorporating the use of systems thinking to improve interdisciplinary learning from both the learner and teacher perspective. Land Economics/Use,

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in land-based investments for food, feed, fuel and fiber, driven by volatility in commodity prices, economic growth of emerging economies, policy drivers of biofuel demand and investor strategies in the wake of the global economic crisis. This has led to a surge of foreign and local investments in developing countries, where land can be obtained at lower cost, and has led to fears of land grabbing.