The objective of this policy note on
land is to assist the Government of Moldova in improving the
effectiveness of land management in agriculture, with a view
to enhancing the sector's contribution to
Moldova's economic growth and poverty reduction
objectives. The note reviews the progress that has been
made to date on land reform in Moldova, and provides
rigorous economic analysis of the impacts of the reforms and

The authors develop a model of land
leasing with agents characterized by unobserved
heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor
market. In this case, decentralized land rental may
contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have
several advantages over administrative reallocation. The
extent to which this is true empirically is explored using
data from three of China's poorest provinces. The

The objective of this paper is to
present a succinct and up-to-date review of the urban sector
in Egypt, with a focus on issues for which there is new
insight or emerging government interest. The two main themes
of the report are the challenges facing the urban sector and
the policy implications at various levels of government.
Some of the reports mains findings are: urbanization in
Egypt takes on forms and processes which are not well

Are the household characteristics that
are good for transition to a more diversified
market-oriented development process in Vietnam also
important for reducing poverty? Or are there tradeoffs? The
determinants of both poverty incidence and participation in
rural off-farm activities are modeled as functions of
household and community characteristics using comprehensive
national household surveys for 1993 and 1998. Despite some

The main objective of this research is to investigate land market values, urban land policies and their impacts on urban centers in Rwanda. Three (3) specific objectives can be distinguished namely: a) Evaluating the determinants of urban land markets; b) Analysis of trends in urban land markets and values; and c) Assessing impacts of urban land prices and policies.

While liberalizing key factor markets is
a crucial step in the transition from a socialist
control-economy to a market economy, the process can be
stalled by imperfect information, high transaction costs,
and covert resistance from entrenched interests. The authors
study land-market adjustment in the wake of Vietnam's
reforms aiming to establish a free market in land-use rights
following de-collectivization. Inefficiencies in the initial

Es un caso donde una familia campesina que se ve obligada a migrar a otra área rural, compra tierras y se estable en la vereda El Rosal del municipio de Paipa, para dedicarse a la producción agroecológica y el autoconsumo.

This Investment Climate Policy Note
(ICPN) for Sierra Leone evaluates the country's
business environment by: (i) analyzing barriers to private
sector investment and growth and how they vary among
different types of firms; (ii) benchmarking Sierra
Leone's investment climate and firm performance to that
of other countries; and (iii) providing recommendations to
promote and strengthen the private sector. The ICPN is

We use nationally representative survey data from two neighboring countries in Southern Africa – Zambia and Malawi – to characterize the current status of rural land rental market participation by smallholder farmers. We find that rural rental market participation is strongly conditioned by land scarcity, and thus is more advanced in Malawi than in lower-density Zambia. In both countries, we find evidence that rental markets contribute to efficiency gains within the smallholder sector by facilitating the transfer of land from less-able to more-able producers.

Cities emerge from the spatial
concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial
concentration is not enough; the economic viability of
cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly
across the urban area. This constant movement within dense
cities creates wealth but also various degrees of
unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative
externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and

The Government of Sierra Leone (GosL)
and the World Bank (WB) have agreed upon the design and
implementation of a growth poles program (GPP) in support of
the agenda for prosperity (A4P), the GoSL's third
poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSPIII). With support
from the European Union competitive industries and
innovation practice trust fund, the WB has been undertaking
a series of scoping and diagnostic analyses on the GPP since

The first paper of this section
(Durand-Laserve) documents how increasing pressures on urban
land and the 'commodification' of shelter and
settlement has increased 'market evictions' of
families holding intermediate tide to property, although
international declarations and pressures have contributed to
reducing 'forced evictions.' The second paper
(Mooya and Cloete) uses the tools of the New Institutional