textabstractMainstream adherence to land titling as a strategy to address rural poverty has gained even more sway against the backdrop of the contemporary phenomenon of large-scale farmland acquisitions, known to some as “global land grabbing”. The orthodox narrative, embraced in toto by organisations such as the World Bank, is that formal property rights mitigate the risks of these land acquisitions and allow the poor to access the benefits of these acquisitions.

This Topic Guide covers: the trends in and drivers of large-scale land acquisition, and the associated costs, risks and benefits; the provision of and access to more accurate data on large-scale land acquisitions, and key international and regional initiatives to provide guidelines to enhance security of tenure and promote good quality investment; land reform issues such as land tenure regularisation and land administration systems; and land issues in the context of fragile states, and conflict and post-conflict situations.

This paper has the following main objectives: to review the actual or potential impact of land titling and cadastre programs on indigenous populations; to recommend actions that would minimize risk and ensure that land projects are tailored to the aspirations and needs of indigenous peoples; to outline a typology of indigenous landholding systems and to identify any areas requiring further research.

The role of property rights in resource allocation has been one of the central themes in development economics. There exists extensive theoretical arguments that property rights in land are closely associated with the productive efficiency of agricultural resources as well as investment decisions. However, empirical findings have not been conclusive. This has been complicated due to possible endogeneity of titles, unobserved hetrogeneities and the non-experimental nature of the data. To overcome these problems, the study employs an instrumental variable and fixed effect models.

This paper contributes to an emerging literature on free land arrangements in developing countries. We argue that in-depth empirical analysis is crucial to understand the specific terms of land arrangements. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative data collected among rural-urban migrants in Thailand, we categorize land arrangements along four dimensions: self-reported categories by the actors, the nature of the relationship between the parties involved, the nature of the payment made, and how explicit or binding are the contractual terms.

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization. During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to millions of poor households. Many of these reforms stalled. Titled land remains the de facto preserve of wealthy households and, within households, men.

health, land titling

This paper analyzes the importance of legal property documents in providing tenure security, enhancing agricultural investment incentives and easing access to credit. While theory predicts that better property rights on land can increase investment through increased security, enhanced trade opportunities and increased collateral value of land, the presence and size of these effects depend crucially on whether those rights are properly enforced. In Nicaragua, a troubled history of land expropriation and invasion has undermined the credibility of the legal property regime.

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization. During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to milions of poor households. Many of these reforms stalled. Titled land remains the de facto preserve of wealthy households and, within householsd, men.

This paper analyzes the impact of land titling on child health. The empirical evaluation of the effect of property rights typically suffers from selection problems. The paper addresses the selection issue by exploiting a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles. Twenty years ago, a group of squatters occupied a piece of privately owned land in a suburban area of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The effects of land sales restrictions on credit use, land investment and cultivation decisions are investigated using data from two villages in south India. Sales restrictions are found to have little effect on credit supply and demand or demand for land improvements. Some household characteristics are found to affect investment demand on plots subject to sales restrictions in one village, suggesting that the 'transactions effect' of such restrictions may be inhibiting allocative efficiency.