Can more vigorous political competition significantly raise rural land values, or contribute to more robust land rental markets? Exploiting exogenous variation in the national popularity of Pakistan’s political parties during the 2008 elections, we show that provincial assembly constituencies with greater competition between political parties had significantly higher land values and more active land rental markets four years later.

After 30 years of dynamic growth and substantial poverty reduction in Asia, do agriculture and rural development still have a role to play in that region? The policy briefs in this collection provide abundant evidence that they do. Although the incidence of people living in poverty fell from more than 50 percent in the mid-1970s to 18 percent in 2004, and the incidence of hunger fell to 16 percent, Asia is still home to more than half of the world’s poor, most of whom live in rural areas. Agriculture and rural development are thus still key to reducing poverty and hunger in the region.

This paper presents the construction of a 1996 regionalized Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Mexico. The SAM differentiates production across five regions, four rural and a fifth "national" urban region. The rural regions are differentiated by their agricultural production technologies. There are three households in each region, disaggregated by income level, so that the SAM can be used in studies of income distribution.

We estimate the impact of improved market access on household well-being and nutrition using a quasi-experimental setting in Ethiopia. We find that households in remote areas consume substantially less than households nearer to markets, they are more food insecure, and their school enrollment rates are lower. Although their diets are also less diverse, we find no significant differences in anthropometric measures. Part of these welfare differences can be attributed to lower household agricultural production in remote areas.

Public spending on agriculture in Nigeria is exceedingly low. Less than 2 percent of total federal expenditure was allotted to agriculture during 2001 to 2005, far lower than spending in other key sectors such as education, health, and water. This spending contrasts dramatically with the sector's importance in the Nigerian economy and the policy emphasis on diversifying away from oil, and falls well below the 10 percent goal set by African leaders in the 2003 Maputo agreement.

India's strategy for reducing poverty and hunger has always placed a great deal of importance on the agricultural sector, reflecting the fact that 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas and the overwhelming majority of them depend upon agriculture as their primary source of income. The focus of attention has of course changed over time.

Risk-sensitive land use planning is
vital for sustainable economic development and effective
Disaster Risk Management (DRM). Urban development programs
should adopt risk-sensitive land use planning to encourage
resilient development guiding the growth of people, assets
and services within and away from hazardous zones. Many East
Asia and the Pacific (EAP) countries have national land use
policy and local plans which incorporate risk assessments;

The purpose of this report is to review
and assess Afghanistan's legal framework regulating
social safeguards (national and local laws, regulations,
procedures and policies) with special reference to the law
and practice of compulsory land acquisition, or
expropriation. The overall objective of the report is to
consider how Afghanistan's legal framework would
address social safeguard issues in upcoming World Bank

This study exploits a natural experiment
to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility
outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies
and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households
could influence their usufruct rights to land via a
demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the
impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights
on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data

Land rights for women are important to
women's overall role in the household economy. In most
Europe and Central Asia (ECA) countries, women have equal
rights to land by law, but practice varies widely across the
region. Improving gender outcomes in land administration is
therefore related more to education and the need to change
norms and habits than it is to a specific legislative
problem. Access to gender-disaggregated data and the

This note recounts that by the early
2000s, the Government of Mexico and the Secretariat of
Agrarian Reform, in particular, had come to see investment
in "the more dynamic young segment of the population
endowed with more human capital" as the key to
revitalizing the moribund rural economy of the
country's social sector. Approaching this objective
programmatically would entail establishing a land fund from

This paper presents early evidence from
the first large-scale randomized-controlled trial of a land
formalization program. The study examines the links between
land demarcation and investment in rural Benin in light of a
model of agricultural production under insecure tenure. The
demarcation process involved communities in the mapping and
attribution of land rights; cornerstones marked parcel
boundaries and offered lasting landmarks. Consistent with