Purchasing development rights is a major mechanism for the protection of environmental quality and landscape amenities. This paper provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that takes into account land costs and probability of land use conversion. We compare two strategies. Subject to a budget constraint on parcel purchases, the standard strategy is to target parcels with the highest ratio of environmental benefits to land costs. The standard strategy selects parcels even if there is little probability that the parcel would otherwise be converted.

Rural Development - Common Property Resource Development Communities and Human Settlements - Urban Slums Upgrading Public Sector Management and Reform Urban Development - Urban Housing Public Sector Economics Public Sector Development Environment - Sustainable Land Management

This paper reports on a randomized field experiment that uses price incentives to address economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization. During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to millions of poor households. Many of these reforms stalled. Titled land remains the de facto preserve of wealthy households and, within households, men.

The paper highlights that land degradation in India has been approaching a crisis level in spite of repeated emphasis on wasteland development and existence of apex level organisations for that purpose. One reason has been the policy emphasis on ownership and control rather than appropriate management of the land. It is set in the context of i) the 1988 Forest Policy, and ii) the recent amends to the Forest Conservation Act.

Issues swirling around land across Africa have never been so central to key social and political-economic dynamics as they are at the present time. The first part of the paper briefly reviews the construction of customary tenure and the historical phases of administrative interventions into land tenure, and considers their heritage in contemporary situations.

Urban Development - Urban Governance and Management Rural Development - Common Property Resource Development Communities and Human Settlements - Land Use and Policies Rural Development - Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction Public Sector Management and Reform Public Sector Development

Rural Development - Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction Gender - Gender and Law Communities and Human Settlements - Land Administration Communities and Human Settlements - Land Use and Policies Private Sector Development - Land and Real Estate Development Rural Development - Common Property Resource Development

Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions might entail substantial welfare implications for the affected rural population. Whether the impacts are indeed as devastating as the popular notion of land grabs would suggest depends on a number of factors, including the size of compensation payments, productivity spillovers on smallholders, employment opportunities for displaced farmers, and changes in food prices.

The attractiveness of agricultural land available in developing countries has markedly increased in the last few years. Driven by rising and highly volatile prices for agricul- tural commodities, large land acquisitions have been undertaken by foreign investors. We formalize the discussion surrounding such large scale land deals through a dynamic stochastic programming model. Within this framework, we first determine the value of a land development project under uncertainty about prices for agricultural commodi- ties, political risk and irreversible capital investment.

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The first order effect of a productivity increment in the output sector of a monocentric city which increase wages in the city is exactly capitalized in the increment in land rent in the city. We observe this result in the "open city" model in which a worker's utility level in city i is determined outside of city i.