This note lays out the rationale for
including land administration quality index in the standard
‘registering property’ indicator by doing business and
discusses initial evidence from the global sample, showing
that many countries, including some that have performed well
on Doing Business’s traditional ranking, have a long way to
go to establish a system of land administration that is
reliable and transparent, achieves sufficient coverage, and

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

Albania's radical farmland
distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis
and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it
led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient,
and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to
lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This
paper uses farm-level data from the 2005 Albania Living
Standards Measurement Survey to explore this quantitatively.

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

Rapid population growth in many
developing countries has raised concerns regarding food
security and household welfare. To understand the
consequences of population growth in a general equilibrium
setting, this paper examines the dynamics of population
density and its impacts on household outcomes. The analysis
uses panel data from Indonesia combined with district-level
demographic data. Historically, Indonesia has adapted to

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative

Land rights and the systems that
administer them can vary significantly across the world and
within countries (World Bank 2003). For a number of reasons,
land rights may be unclear or insecure. Securing land rights
plays an important role in driving economic growth and
poverty reduction. In recent years there has been increasing
awareness of the relevance of land tenure issues to food
security, climate change, rapid urbanization, informality,

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

This sourcebook is intended to be a
ready reference for practitioners (including World Bank
stakeholders, clients in borrowing countries, and World Bank
project leaders) seeking state-of-the-art information about
good land management approaches, innovations for
investments, and close monitoring for potential scaling up.
This sourcebook is divided into three parts: the first part
identifies the need and scope for sustainable land

This study assesses the alignment of
land use, land tenure, and land market outcomes in El
Salvador with public policy aspirations in recent decades
for efficient, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable
development in both urban and rural spaces. In doing so the
study indirectly gauges the effectiveness of land sector
institutions in facilitating such developmental outcomes in
agricultural production, urbanization, and forest

Unequal land distribution and the
negative social and economic implications resulting from
such polarization in Colombia have long been of concern to
policymakers. A 1950 World Bank mission identified unequal
land distribution as a key impediment to economic and social
development in the country. Since then, a wide range of
policies has been adopted to deal with this issue and its
consequences. Numerous studies show that the success of

Land and real estate reforms have not
been effective at achieving their objectives, in part
because of how they have been designed and implemented. To
be successful, reforms must become comprehensive in design,
argue the authors, although implementation may be phased
over time and take local conditions into account. Reform
must include three elements: 1) Institutional reforms that
better define property rights, reduce information asymmetry,