The Northeast region of Brazil has long
been the single largest pocket of rural poverty in Latin
America. With a combined area of 1.6 million square
kilometers-16 percent of Brazil's total-the Northeast
is home to 45 million people, 28 percent of Brazil's
total population , of whom 5.4 million people live on about
$1 a day and a total of 10.7 million on $1.60 or less per
day. Nearly half of all rural communities are in the

Although sharecropping has long
fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual
form are still poorly understood and the debate over the
extent of moral hazard is far from settled. The authors
address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord
supervision. When tenant effort is observable, but at a cost
to the landlord, otherwise identical share-tenants can
receive different levels of supervision and have different

Housing is one of the most important
sectors of the economy -- in developing countries as in
richer ones -- with large positive externalities in terms of
economic growth, public health and societal stability. It is
the primary form of asset accumulation for the poor -- often
representing more than 50 percent of the assets of
households. However, housing systems in developing countries
are dominated by badly designed, poorly targeted, and

The need for land-related investment to
ensure sustainable land management and increase productivity
of land use is widely recognized. However, there is little
rigorous evidence on the effects of property rights for
increasing agricultural productivity and contributing toward
poverty reduction in Africa. Whether and by how much
overlapping property rights reduce investment incentives,
and the scope for policies to counter such disincentives,

Although transfer of agricultural land
ownership through land reform had positive impacts on
productivity, investment, and political empowerment in many
cases, institutional arrangements in West Bengal -- which
made tenancy heritable and imposed a prohibition on
subleasing -- imply that early land reform benefits may not
be sustained and gains from this policy remain well below
potential. Data from a listing of 96,000 households in 200

As countries increasingly strive to
transform their economies from agriculture-based into a
diversified one, land rental will become of greater
importance. It will thus be critical to complement research
on the efficiency of specific land rental arrangements --
such as sharecropping -- with an inquiry into the broader
productivity impacts of the land rental market. Plot-level
data for a matched landlord-tenant sample in an environment

The objective of this Poverty and Social
Impact Analysis (PSIA) is to assess the impact of systematic
registration on vulnerable individuals, in general, and
Roma, in particular. Specifically, this PSIA focuses on the
systematic registration approach piloted under the
Complementing EU Support for Agricultural Restructuring
(CESAR, 2009 - 2013) Project, which was supported by the
World Bank. The World Bank involvement in the sector dates

This paper is motivated by the emphasis
on secure property rights as a determinant of economic
development in recent literature. The authors use village
and household level information from about 800 villages
throughout China to explore whether legal reform increased
protection of land rights against unauthorized reallocation
or expropriation with below-average compensation by the
state. The analysis provides nation-wide evidence on a

Mixed evidence on the impact of formal title in much of Africa is often used to question the relevance of dealing with land policy issues in this continent. The authors use data from Uganda to assess the impact of a disaggregated set of rights on investment, productivity, and land values, and to test the hypothesis that individuals' lack of knowledge of the new law reduces their tenure security. Results point toward strong and positive effects of greater tenure security and transferability.

The objective of this policy note on
land is to assist the Government of Moldova in improving the
effectiveness of land management in agriculture, with a view
to enhancing the sector's contribution to
Moldova's economic growth and poverty reduction
objectives. The note reviews the progress that has been
made to date on land reform in Moldova, and provides
rigorous economic analysis of the impacts of the reforms and

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

As the world is urbanizing, many cities
are grappling with a population that is growing rapidly,
thereby increasing demand for land and housing. This
pressure on land and housing markets often is exacerbated by
inappropriate or inadequate policies. The result is a supply
of well-located land and housing that falls well short of
demand and the proliferation of poorly serviced informal
settlements, many of which are located far from jobs, city