This paper analyses the income and structural effects of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS). In particular, we analyze how the income distributional effects and farm restructuring are impacted by the SPS by accounting for entitlement tradability, cross-compliance and CAP 'greening' requirements, different SPS implementation models, and the entitlement stock. Our results suggest that the SPS implication details are highly important: farmers’ benefits can range from 100% of the SPS value to a negative policy incidence, and farm structural change may be hindered by the SPS.

For many years, land markets have been analyzed as though parcels of land were being traded in a frictionless market subject to no rules. To the extent that there were rules which could not be ignored – such as land-use regulations – the effect of these was incorporated as ‘distortions’ to the market. An institutional analysis of land markets, on the contrary, starts by looking the the rules which structure the exchange of rights in land.

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).

We argue that interdependencies between farms are crucial for assessing effects of direct payments on farmers exit decisions. Using spatially explicit farm level data for nearly all Norwegian farms, a binary choice model with spatially lagged explanatory variables is estimated in order to explain farm survival from 1999 to 2009. We show that ignoring spatial interactions between farm leads to a substantial overestimation of the effects of direct payments on farm survival.

In agrarian societies land serves as the main means not only for generating a livelihood but often also for accumulating wealth and transferring it between generations. How land rights are assigned therefore determines households'ability to generate subsistence and income, their social and economic status (and in many cases their collective identity), their incentive to exert nonobservable effort and make investments, and often their ability to access financial markets or to make arrangements for smoothing consumption and income.

This article evaluates the recent evolution of farm structure in Kazakhstan's grain region against the reform objectives of the 1990s and the family farm theory that underpinned the latter. In the study region, super-large agroholdings, large-scale enterprises and smaller individual farms emerged side-by-side and now compete for resources in a homogenous production environment. Drawing on two survey rounds of farm-level data, we find that the agroholdings display the highest factor productivity and are the most competitive on land and labour markets among all farms.

A theory of land market activity is developed for settings where there is uncertainty and private information about the security of land tenure. Land sellers match with buyers in a competitive search environment, and an illiquid land market emerges as a screening mechanism. As a consequence, adverse selection and an insecure system of property rights stifle land market transactions. The implications of the theory are tested using household level data from Indonesia.

The paper investigates the current situation with fragmentation of family farms in Moldova and its effects on family well-being and farm productivity. A key hypothesis is that consolidation of agricultural land in Moldova has beneficial effects in terms of productivity and is desirable in the long run. We examine the case for market-driven land consolidation using data from several recent surveys in Moldova. We show that, in the individual sector, larger farms consume less of their output and attain higher levels of commercialization.

This paper explains regionally differentiated patterns of structural change based on a theoretical framework dealing with strategic interaction of farms on the land market. The main research question focuses on the causes of regionally persistent structures. An empirical Markov chain model is defined for the West German agricultural sector. Thereby it is possible to explain the probabilities of farm growth, decline or exit in terms of the current and former regional farm size structure.

This paper contributes to an emerging literature on free land arrangements in developing countries. We argue that in-depth empirical analysis is crucial to understand the specific terms of land arrangements. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative data collected among rural-urban migrants in Thailand, we categorize land arrangements along four dimensions: self-reported categories by the actors, the nature of the relationship between the parties involved, the nature of the payment made, and how explicit or binding are the contractual terms.

We analyse the importance of farm level spatial interaction for farm growth. We hypothesize that farms compete on local land markets and interact through knowledge transfer leading to positive and negative feedbacks, respectively. One of the main challenges in the analysis of farm level interaction is to distinguish between actual interactions from the effects of spatially correlated omitted variables. We approach this challenge be estimating a spatially lagged explanatory model (SLX) employing two spatial weighting matrix differentiating between a local and regional neighbourhood.

This paper synthesizes and extends the results of urban land market studies carried out in three Brazilian cities – Brasília, Curitiba and Recife. The purpose of the studies is to empirically assess the performance of urban land markets in different cities and to gauge the feasibility of applying the Land Market Assessment methodology in Brazil.