The authors use data from Nicaragua to
examine the impact of the award of registered and
nonregistered title on land values and on investments
attached to land. They find that receipt of registered title
increases land values by 30 percent and greatly increases
the propensity to invest, bringing investment closer to the
optimum. Consistent with descriptive statistics indicating
great demand for regularization of land rights, especially

This report is about integrated land
policy reform in context of rapid urbanization in China.
Over the past thirty years, China has undergone a profound
economic and social transformation as it moves towards a
market-oriented economy. Land issues are implicated in this
ongoing transformation in numerous ways. The allocation and
security of land rights are key factors in China's
quest for economic growth and social stability. Land use

This paper takes a critical view of the
challenges that lie ahead for land?related development
projects in Central America. Drawing upon several sources of
information and types of analysis, including literature
reviews, field visits and rapid participatory assessments,
along with decades of professional experience, the authors
examine land-related development policies and projects over
the past two decades in Central America (although monitoring

The 2003 land law defines that the Land
Tenure Certificate (LTCs) carries both the wife's and
husband's names. Theoretically, the requirement of both
the wife's and husband's names on the LTCs aims at
enabling the wife to participate more actively in household
economic production for poverty reduction, and to protect
the rights of the woman in the event of civil disputes over
the land that has been provided with a LTCs. A field-based

The authors review the role of land
policies in the evolving farm structure of transition
countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). They show how
different policies for land property rights, degrees of
control of land rental and sale markets, and procedures for
restructuring former collective or state farms resulted in
significantly different farm structures in CEE countries

Declining soil fertility due to
inadequate farming practices, deforestation and overgrazing
are among the primary impediments to increased agricultural
productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa. These causal factors,
driven by social, economic and political forces, manifest
themselves in market, policy and institutional failures,
inappropriate technologies and practices. This is also the
case in Tanzania where over 90 percent of the population is

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 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

While there is a large, though
inconclusive, literature on the impact of land titles in
Africa, little attention has been devoted to the study of
land conflict, despite evidence on increasing incidence of
such conflicts. The authors use data from Uganda to explore
who is affected by land conflicts, whether recent legal
changes have helped to reduce their incidence, and to assess
their impact on productivity. Results indicate that

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

This paper provides a brief overview of
the intersection of state and customary laws governing land
in peri-urban settlements around Honiara, focusing on their
impact upon landowners, particularly women landowners. It
suggests that the intersection of customary and state legal
systems allows a small number of individuals, predominantly
men, to solidify their control over customary land. This has
occurred to the detriment of many landowners, who have often

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