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 environmental degradation.

This essay reviews the approaches taken by the Japanese agricultural economists on farmland concentration and consolidation. We critically discuss how scholars saw and understood the 'land market' and evaluate the achievement and limitations of empirical studies. We suggest sharing a more realistic image of land markets, evaluation of policies and programs, and designing institutions to facilitate farmland consolidations as important directions for further research. Close collaboration between case-studies and quantitative approaches would be fruitful.

A literature review about the farmland accumulation and the farmland market problem in Marxian economics was performed. Analysis of farmland accumulation and the farmland market has been conducted by relating to agricultural capitalization. In other words, research was advanced as a differentiation of the farmer class theory, and competition between the large-scale farm and small-scale farm has attracted attention.

In India, land continues to be of
enormous economic, social, and symbolic relevance. The way
in which land can be accessed and its ownership documented
is at the core of the livelihood of the large majority of
the poor, especially in rural and tribal areas and
determines the extent to which increasingly scarce natural
resources are managed. Land policies and administration are
critical determinants of the transaction cost associated

In this paper we present an analysis of power law statistics on land markets. There have been no other studies that have analyzed power law statistics on land markets up to now. We analyzed a database of the assessed value of land, which is officially monitored and made available to the public by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Government of Japan. This is the largest database of Japan's land prices, and consists of approximately 30,000 points for each year of a 6-year period (1995-2000).

Based on a large survey to compare the
effectiveness of land markets and land reform in Colombia,
the authors find that rental and sales markets were more
effective in transferring land to poor but productive
producers than was administrative land reform. The fact that
land transactions were all of a short-term nature and that
little land was transferred from very large to small land
owners or the landless suggests that there may be scope for

The authors review the role of land
policies in the evolving farm structure of transition
countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). They show how
different policies for land property rights, degrees of
control of land rental and sale markets, and procedures for
restructuring former collective or state farms resulted in
significantly different farm structures in CEE countries

This paper sheds light on how to harvest
the "youth dividend" in Sub-Saharan Africa by
creating jobs in agriculture. The agriculture that attracts
the youth will have to be profitable, competitive, and
dynamic. These are the same characteristics needed for
agriculture to deliver growth, to improve food security, and
to preserve a fragile natural environment. With higher
priority accorded to implementation of well-designed public

This study aims to assess the extent to
which reforms have actually been implemented, the impact
they have had on the rural population, and the challenges
which, as a consequence, need to be addressed by the new
administration. This report is organized as follows: Section
1 describes Mexico's rural economy. It reviews the
broad context of macro, trade, and sector-level reforms, the
strengths and weaknesses of both the productive and

This study identifies several factors
that inhibit efficiency improvements in the farming sector,
both in themselves and through the dynamics of their mutual
interaction. The study observes that incentives faced in the
labor market have important implications for the land
structure and, and in many ways, are at the heart of the
problem of low labor productivity in agriculture. The study
finds that, while rural households are increasingly

This report reviews growth trends in
Armenia for the period 1994-2000, outlines major weaknesses
of existing development patterns, and suggests a package of
policy recommendations designed to accelerate enterprise
restructuring, attract investment, and encourage the
creation of new businesses in the medium term (three to five
years). Such steps are needed to systain (and preferably to
increase) the current growth rates, to stop emigration among

This report finalized in March 2001
constitutes a step toward the objective of designing an
integrated strategy for rural poverty reduction in Brazil,
The report contains an updated and more detailed profile of
the rural poor in the northeast (NE) and southeast (SE) of
Brazil; identifies key determinants of rural poverty in
these regions; and proposes a five-pronged strategic
framework in which to couch a set of integrated policies