In countries where a large proportion of
the total land area is held customarily, reform questions
around land and development often tend to focus on the
customary estate. Evidence from Solomon Islands suggests
that a focus on public land holdings, even when they are
relatively small in land area, can yield outsized benefits.
Publicly owned land regularly includes economically valuable
land and urban land on which development pressure is high.

This note lays out the rationale for
including land administration quality index in the standard
‘registering property’ indicator by doing business and
discusses initial evidence from the global sample, showing
that many countries, including some that have performed well
on Doing Business’s traditional ranking, have a long way to
go to establish a system of land administration that is
reliable and transparent, achieves sufficient coverage, and

Land and property rights, migration, and
citizenship are complex issues that cut across all social,
economic, and political spheres of West Africa. This paper
provides an overarching scoping of the most pressing
contemporary issues related to land, migration, and
citizenship, including how they intersect in various
contexts and locations in West Africa. The way issues are
analytically framed captures structural challenges and sets

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.

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

This report on the assessment of land
governance in Brazil summarizes and discusses the results of
a series of standardized self-assessments of the land
governance situation in Brazil, conducted entirely by
Brazilian speakers. Therefore, these findings represent the
perception of local experts based on their experience of
news and data available. The main aim of this report are
federal and state authorities directly involved in land

What are the socioeconomic impacts of
resource abundance? Are these effects different at the
national and local levels? How could resource booms benefit
(or harm) local communities? This paper reviews a vast
literature examining these questions, with an emphasis on
empirical works. First, the evidence and theoretical
arguments behind the so-called resource curse, and other
impacts at the country level, are reviewed. This

This paper investigates how land size
measurements vary across three common land measurement
methods (farmer estimated, Global Positioning System (GPS),
and compass and rope), and the effect of land size
measurement error on the inverse farm size relationship and
input demand functions. The analysis utilizes plot-level
data from the second wave of the Nigeria General Household
Survey Panel, as well as a supplementary land validation

This study exploits a natural experiment
to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility
outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies
and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households
could influence their usufruct rights to land via a
demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the
impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights
on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land

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,

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