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

This note summarizes the key findings of
the attached consultant report. India is still primarily a
rural, agrarian economy in which land use and land rights
are an emotional issue. Prior to 1990 the presumption was
that only residual land (non agricultural) would be made
available for industrial use and because the state was the
principal industrial investor the state would acquire any
land needed. After 1990 the expectation was that private

Land area measurement is a fundamental
component of agricultural statistics and analysis. Yet,
commonly employed self-reported land area measures used in
most analysis are not only potentially measured with error,
but these errors may be correlated with agricultural
outcomes. Measures employing Global Positioning Systems, on
the other hand, while not perfect especially on smaller
plots, are likely to provide more precise measures and

The goal of this report is to take stock
of the existing evidence on the impact of the Comprehensive
Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) on poverty, to examine the
current challenges that an extension of CARP would face, and
to suggest directions toward achieving progress on land
reform given the financial and policy constraints faced by
the program. The report starts by examining the nature and
relevance of the challenges that an extension of the land

The main objective of the Egypt Public
Land Management Strategy is to provide the Government of
Egypt (GOE) with practical and politically feasible policy
recommendations to reform existing public land management
policies and practices in the aim of improving the business
climate in Egypt. This study is presented in two volumes:
Volume one with the main policy note, supported by Volume
two with background notes on access to public land by

This paper represents an important
dimension in filling Latin America history's gaps
through the lens of land rights. The continent was populated
by many nations, functioned in harmony with nature, had a
variety of cultures and languages, and, developed many
different socio-economic systems (nationally and locally).
These nations were sovereign and recognized from Alaska to
Patagonia. Indeed, among all of them, we know they had very

The pattern of global land use has
important implications for the world's food and timber
supplies, bioenergy, biodiversity and other eco-system
services. However, the productivity of this resource is
critically dependent on the world's climate, as well as
investments in, and dissemination of improved technology.
This creates massive uncertainty about future land use
requirements which compound the challenge faced by

Costa Rica's Program of Payments
for Environmental Services (Pago de Servicios Ambientales,
PSA) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate direct
payments as a conservation policy tool. This paper reports
evidence on how much more forest has been conserved in Costa
Rica as a result of PSA contracts with landowners. Such
evidence requires estimating a counterfactual outcome: how
much forest would have been preserved if there had been no

The authors examine the impact of land
reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to
exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their
land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase
the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term
investments on the part of households. Their
difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes
advantage of the variation across provinces in the issuance

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

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 effectiveness of conservation
interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services
(PES) is often evaluated, if it is evaluated at all, only at
the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by
the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently
successful interventions may not result in long-term
conservation benefits, a problem known as that of
permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the