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;

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on the rural labor market outcomes for
women. The existing literature emphasizes two mechanisms
through which land restrictions can affect the economic
outcomes: the collateral value of land, and (in) security of
property rights. Analysis of this paper focuses on an
alternative mechanism where land restrictions increase costs
of migration out of villages. The testable prediction of

This report examines land access,
disputes, and dispute resolution in Timor-Leste, using
findings from the justice module included in an extension of
the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards (TLSLS2) and
a review of relevant social-science literature. The
extension survey (TLSLSx) revisited a nationally
representative subsample of the TLSLS2 between April and
October 2008. The respondent for the justice module was

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land

When government officials are involved in land transactions the scope for arbitrary decision making and corruption is large, and the land issue can turn into a political football among rival political parties.

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

To appreciate overall impacts of fragmentation, underlying channels, and potential heterogeneity by holding size, we distinguish average fragment size and mean inter-fragment distance as two aspects of this phenomenon. Estimating a cost function with associated input demand equations on a large nationally representative Indian survey, robust to endogeneity, suggests that fragmentation’s main impact is to reduce mean plot size below the threshold for mechanization. Higher inter-fragment distances increase costs for larger holdings, but by a much smaller magnitude.

Land markets that allow access to
land-and to buildings-through secure property rights, at
transparent prices, and with efficient permitting processes
and land tax systems are essential to a good business
environment. Creating such markets, however, can be a long,
complex, politically charged process, especially where most
land is untitled and where there are conflicting claims. But
experience points to practical interim or step solutions

Land markets play a limited role in
subsistence economies with low skill-intensity of
agricultural cultivation, equally distributed land
endowments and little movement out of agriculture to join
the non-farm economy. But, as the economy starts to
diversify, the scope for efficiency-enhancing land transfers
beyond immediate kin and for longer than just one season
assumes significantly greater importance. Lease markets can

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative

Using census data from the Censo
Agropecuario 1995-96, the authors map indicators of current
land use, and agricultural productivity across Brazil's
Legal Amazon, These data permit geographical resolution
about ten times finer than afforded by "municipio"
data, used in previous studies. The authors focus on the
extent, and productivity of pasture, the dominant land use
in Amazonia today. Simple tabulations suggest that most

Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of
a land tenure regularization program covering the entire
country allows the use of administrative data to describe
initial performance and combine the data with household
surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent
transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In
2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between
5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent