Economic, agronomic, and biophysical
drivers affect global land use, so all three influences need
to be considered in evaluating economically optimal
allocations of the world's land resources. A dynamic,
forward-looking optimization framework applied over the
course of the coming century shows that although some
deforestation is optimal in the near term, in the absence of
climate change regulation, the desirability of further

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

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

Although increased global demand for
land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
models to address these issues quickly and at the required
scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the

Government entities in India hold large
amounts of public land. Their landholdings include some of
the most valuable property in the country. Parts of this
patrimony lie vacant or underutilized. Public sector bodies
also own large blocs of land that sometimes stand in the way
of efficient completion of urban infrastructure networks. At
the same time, urban India is deficient in basic
infrastructure -- both network infrastructure needed to

In India, land continues to be of
enormous economic, social, and symbolic relevance. The main
purpose of this report is to review new empirical evidence
on land administration and land policy, as well as the
possible interaction between the two, to derive policy
conclusions. The empirical basis for the discussion of land
administration is provided by a review of land records,
survey and settlement, and land registration in 14 states.

This paper investigates the impact of
land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of
China's rural residents. A simple model first frames
the relationship among these variables and the probability
that a reallocation of land will occur in the following
year. After first demonstrating that a village leader's
support for administrative land reallocation carries with it
the risk of losing a future election, the paper exploits

Empirical evidence indicates that in
many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal
land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor.
Structural transformation in such developing economies
depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these
most-vulnerable populations located on abundant but marginal
agricultural land. Although the modern sector may be the
source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and

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

While liberalizing key factor markets is
a crucial step in the transition from a socialist
control-economy to a market economy, the process can be
stalled by imperfect information, high transaction costs,
and covert resistance from entrenched interests. The authors
study land-market adjustment in the wake of Vietnam's
reforms aiming to establish a free market in land-use rights
following de-collectivization. Inefficiencies in the initial

Raising capital to finance urban
infrastructure is a challenge. One solution is to
'unlock' urban land values - such as by selling
public lands to capture the gains in value created by
investment in infrastructure projects. Land-based financing
techniques are playing an increasingly important role in
financing urban infrastructure in developing countries. They
complement other capital financing approaches, such as local

This paper assesses the relation between
access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
(1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
positive association between increased market accessibility
and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but