India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) employs about 50 million men and women every year and offers an important opportunity for in-vestigating the link between public works spending and the politi-cal allocation of funds. First of all, MGNREGS is derived from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which grants citizens the “right to work” on local in-frastructure projects at a set minimum wage.

Using the case of Zambia, this paper examines whether structural change translates into reduced poverty and improved social welfare through an empirical and systematic analysis of the country’s growth trajectory during 1991–2010. We find that growth after 2002 was accompanied by positive structural change, but most new jobs were in the low-wage, insecure informal sector in urban areas.

Agriculture, including fisheries and forestry, accounted for 36.4 percent of Myanmar’s GDP in 2010-2011. Approximately 69 percent of the total population of 59.78 million (2010-2011) lives in rural areas and 61.2 percent of the total labor force is employed by the agricul-ture sector (MOAI 2012). The government has designated the agriculture sector as a main pillar of the economy and is dedicating vari-ous efforts and investments to achieve greater progress in the sector. Rice is the primary crop, followed by maize, pulses, and oil seeds.

This article aims specific markets agricultural land prices determination and forecast using hedonic prices methodology. The absence of official or trustworthy information on land prices makes this very important in Brazil. This multiple regression model has as dependent variable the price per hectare and the next explanatory variables: physical attributes (soil, relief), production (systems of production, localization, access), and infrastructure of the property and expectations (regional situation, local investments).

A guest post by Robert Oberndorf, Resource Law Specialist, Tenure and Global Climate Change Project

Guest commentary by Dr. Cynthia M. Caron, Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change, Clark University.

By Dr. Matt Sommerville, Chief of Party, Tenure and Global Climate Change Project.
At the recently concluded 2013 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference in Warsaw, Poland, negotiators agreed to a landmark set of decisions. After seven years of negotiations, United Nations (UN) member states reached a consensus on a framework to reward countries for REDD+ actions (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).
[Read more on the background of REDD+ negotiations and the links to land tenure and natural resource rights.]

The author provides a briefing on cost-benefit analyses (CBA) for disaster risk reduction (DRR), stating that the most cost-effective forms of DRR investment tend to be non-structural approaches, such as land use planning, warning systems, and household-level changes. These are often backed by structural measures, making full separation difficult. Barriers to enacting DRR savings occur because political capital is rarely gained from implementing DRR, except in cases where it is visible and tangible and might not even be the most effective DRR approach.

By Peter Giampaoli, Climate Change Specialist, Land Tenure and Property Rights Division, USAID. Clear, secure rights to manage and use forests are an important aspect of sustaining traditions and economic opportunities. Although this web site often discusses property rights in the context of developing countries, insecure title and undocumented land rights can undermine smallholder ownership in the United States as well.

USAID is pleased to announce a first-of-its-kind partnership between the Governments of Ethiopia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Federal Republic of Germany to improve rural land governance. Building on existing programs and the seven land country partnerships announced at this year’s G8 Open for Growth Summit, this new partnership will support greater transparency in rural land governance, promote responsible agricultural investment, and improve Ethiopia’s legal framework and practices related to rural land administration and land use.

By Dr. Gregory Myers, USAID Division Chief, Land Tenure and Property Rights
USAID recently sponsored Devex’s Land Matters campaign in order to raise awareness about the importance of property rights. Throughout this campaign I stress that secure land tenure and property rights (LTPR) is the gateway to economic growth, food security, sustainable natural resources management, and other development goals.