This book seeks to critically examine the challenges of fragility and security in West Africa, along with the factors of resilience. It seeks to investigate key drivers of conflict and violence, and the way in which they impact the countries of the subregion. Along with emerging threats and challenges, these include the challenge of youth inclusion; migration; regional imbalances; extractives; the fragility of political institutions and managing the competition for power; security; and land.

In 1982, because there was increasing pressure on land resources in Thailand, the Department of Lands designed and implemented a 20 year Land Titling Program (LTP) to grant secure tenure to agricultural landholders. The success of the program has been due to a number of factors, including the clear vision for the project, the long-term plan to achieve this vision and the commitment of RTG and key stakeholders to project implementation. There was also a strong policy, legal and institutional framework for land administration in Thailand and a long history of land titling.

Financial regulation affects government
revenue whenever it imposes both the mandatory quantity and
price of government bonds. This paper studies a banking
regulation adopted by the National Bank of Ethiopia in April
2011, which forces all private banks to purchase a fixed
negative-yield government bond in proportion to private
sector lending. Having access to monthly bank balance
sheets, a survey of branch costs and public finances

The extractive industries (EI) sector occupies an outsize space in the economies of many developing countries. Economists, public finance professionals, and policy makers working in such countries are frequently confronted with issues that require an in-depth understanding of the sector. The objective of this volume is to provide a concise overview of EI-related topics these professionals are likely to encounter.

As countries increasingly strive to transform their economies from agriculture‐based into a diversified one, land rental will become of greater importance. It will thus be critical to complement research on the efficiency of specific land rental arrangements such as sharecropping with an inquiry into the broader productivity impacts of the land rental market. Plot‐level data for a matched landlord–tenant sample in an environment where sharecropping dominates allow us to explore both issues.

In absence of deposit insurance,
underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination
failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset
holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment
in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a
government can solve this failure by imposing safe asset
purchases, which boosts deposits by increasing depositor
repayment in bad states. In so doing, financial regulation

Over the past twenty years, Uganda’s
population density has been increasing rapidly, placing
significant pressure on the use of land. Uganda now has a
population density of 194 persons per square kilometer of
arable land, compared to 80 in Kenya and 116 in Ghana. At
present, the majority of Uganda’s population still lives in
rural areas, where the main source of livelihood is
agriculture. However, the proportion of the population

With the aim of promoting national food security, the Vietnamese government enforces the designation of around 35 per cent of agricultural land strictly for paddy rice cultivation. We investigate the economic effects of adjusting this policy, using an economy-wide model of Vietnam with detailed modelling of region-specific land use, agricultural activity, poverty and food security measures.

Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s
agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s
performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and
exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in
efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese
agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural
sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities,
industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising

Despite strong economic growth,
investment in basic urban infrastructure -- water supply,
wastewater removal and treatment, roads, and other
capital-intensive systems -- has failed to keep pace with
urban growth, leaving a critical urban infrastructure
deficit. At the same time, urban lands in these many
developing countries are among the most expensive in the
world. Much of this land is owned by public authorities.

The urban land policy reforms implemented in Peru since 1996 aimed at the creation of a system able to assure formal rights to real property in large urban settlements. This case study looks at the factors that motivated reform, how the reform process itself was managed, the results, and lessons learned.

West Africa’s coastal area is critical
to the region, home to a third of its people and the source
of about half of its gross domestic product (GDP). Because
most of it is composed of mangroves and sand formations, the
area’s coastline is also highly vulnerable to erosion caused
by coastal currents and storm surges. Erosion is evident
from Mauritania to Gabon - and the rates of erosion are
increasing. Around the port of Lome, for example, Togo’s