This report evaluates the legal
framework for rural land rights, the regulations of rural
housing sites, the effects of land requisition on farmers
who lose land, and some selected issues affecting urban land
rights. The focus of this report is how to enhance property
rights in a number of different contexts. The report makes a
series of specific policy recommendations for rural
agricultural land, rural housing land, to protect rights in

The aim of this discussion paper is to
ascertain the government of Lao's (GoL) current
practices in negotiating, awarding, and managing land
concessions; enhance GoL understanding and commitments to
develop national capacities targeting improved land
management, that will generate revenues for GoL, and ensure
sustainable development as an urgent priority; and provide a
basis for dialogue within the government to enable its

This report analyzes land issues in Sri
Lanka, which cannot be seen in isolation from the ethnic and
political conflict and, at the same time, even though land
conflict is often linked with the ethnic conflict in Sri
Lanka, a large number of land conflicts in the North and
East can be resolved prior to a full and national political
solution to the ethnic situation. This report analyzes
constraints and opportunities for an effective governance

Land policy, administration and
management are areas of strong client demand for technical
advice and operational support. This review sought to help
the Bank better position itself to present coherent advice
on policy, institutional arrangements and practice. The
potential implications are a lowering of reputational risk
to the Bank; greater efficiency in the process including
joint data gathering; and building of greater momentum and

The authors use data from Ethiopia to
empirically assess determinants of participation in land
rental markets, compare these to those of administrative
land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact
of households' expectations regarding future
redistribution. Results indicate that rental markets
outperform administrative reallocation in terms of
efficiency and poverty. Households who have part-time jobs

The authors use a large data set from
Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and
transferability to explore determinants of different types
of land-related investment and its possible impact on
productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity
of investment in trees, this is not the case for terraces.
Transfer rights are unambiguously investment-enhancing. The
large productivity effect of terracing implies that, even

This is the second part of land studies
on Northern Uganda designed to inform the Peace, Recovery
and Development Plan (PRDP). This second part of the study,
undertaken during the second half of 2007 in the Lango and
Acholi regions, builds on the first phase conducted in 2006
in the Teso region. This second study has been designed to
present a more quantitative analysis of trends on disputes
and claims on land before displacement, during displacement

Agriculture has made major contributions
to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but
the literature has rarely focused on the institutional
factors that might underpin such structural transformation
and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing
on an 8-year panel of 1,200 households in six key provinces,
it explores the impact of government land reallocations and
formal land-use certificates on agricultural productivity

Although many African countries have
recently adopted highly innovative and pro-poor land laws,
lack of implementation thwarts their potentially
far-reaching impact on productivity, poverty reduction, and
governance. The authors use a representative household
survey from Ethiopia where, over a short period,
certificates to more than 20 million plots were issued to
describe the certification process, explore its incidence

The scope and urgency of the threats to
Nigeria's rural land are no secret. In 2005, a working
group dedicated to formulating a national agricultural land
policy began the process with a comprehensive articulation
of the challenges facing Nigeria's agricultural land.
The litany included recognition that: 1) agricultural land
use in the country has been unsustainable, resulting in no
fewer than eleven types of extensive land degradation and

Although increased global demand for
land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
models to address these issues quickly and at the required
scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the

Secure property rights are considered a
key determinant of economic development. However, evaluation
of the causal effects of land titling is a difficult task.
Since 2004, the Brazilian government, through a program
called "Papel Passado," has issued titles to more
than 85,000 families and has the goal to reach 750,000.
Another topic in public policy that is crucial for
developing economies is child labor force participation. In