This report is a synthesis of information gleaned from four case studies of World Bank-financed land programs in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The case studies were designed to both broaden and deepen our understanding of how land policies affect women and men, with an aim to applying this knowledge in very practical ways to World Ban-supported land projects.

This paper presents a new type of land
market analysis relevant to cities with plural tenure
systems as in West Africa. The methodology hinges on a
systemic analysis of land delivery channels, which helps to
show how land is initially made available for circulation,
how tenure can be formalized incrementally, and the
different means whereby households can access land. The
analysis is applied to the area of Bamako in Mali, where

Although early attempts at land titling
in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights
in view of increased demand for land, options for
registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights
under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by
combining information technology with participatory methods
have led to renewed interest. This paper uses a
difference-in-difference approach to assess economic impacts

Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s
agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s
performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and
exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in
efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese
agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural
sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities,
industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising

A decade ago in Mozambique, a stakeholder workshop where the need to improve access to industrial and commercial land as a means to encourage investment was a topic of discussion, a government official came up to. In order to create new jobs, generate more income, and modernize the economy, many countries see an urgent need to encourage industrial and commercial investment, both domestic and foreign. However, investment in many sectors cannot take place unless land, along with other basic factors of production, is available.

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

The main objective of the Egypt Public
Land Management Strategy is to provide the Government of
Egypt (GOE) with practical and politically feasible policy
recommendations to reform existing public land management
policies and practices in the aim of improving the business
climate in Egypt. This study is presented in two volumes:
Volume one with the main policy note, supported by Volume
two with background notes on access to public land by

When contracts are incomplete, relationship-specific investments may be underprovided due to the threat of opportunistic expropriation or holdup. The authors find evidence of such underinvestment on tenanted land in rural Pakistan. Using data from households cultivating multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, they show that land-specific investment is lower on leased plots. This result is robust to the possible effects of asymmetric information in the leasing market. Greater tenure security also increases land-specific investment on leased plots.

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

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

Groundwater is a vital yet threatened
resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model
of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising
from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability
during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the
trade-off between the ex post inefficiency of long-term
contracts and the ex ante inefficiency of spot contracts.
The structural parameters are estimated using detailed

This study aims to assess the extent to
which reforms have actually been implemented, the impact
they have had on the rural population, and the challenges
which, as a consequence, need to be addressed by the new
administration. This report is organized as follows: Section
1 describes Mexico's rural economy. It reviews the
broad context of macro, trade, and sector-level reforms, the
strengths and weaknesses of both the productive and