Following initial enthusiasm in the post-war period, land reform fell out of favour with donors from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, sporadic efforts to redistribute land continued: Ethiopia in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and a renewed commitment to land reform in the Philippines in 1988. These reforms stemmed from shifts in the domestic balance of power between landowners and landless workers and peasants, which were quite independent of donor policies.

Can land reform have a lasting impact on poverty reduction?

Examines—from the perspective of transaction costs—factors that constrain access to land for the rural poor and other socially excluded groups in India. They find that: Land reform has reduced large landholdings since the 1950s. Medium-size farms have gained most. Formidable obstacles still prevent the poor from gaining access to land. The complexity of land revenue administration in Orissa is partly the legacy of distinctly different systems, which produced more or less complete and accurate land records.

Access to land is deeply important in rural India, where the incidence of poverty is highly correlated with lack of access to land. Mearns provides a framework for assessing alternative approaches to improving access to land by India's rural poor.

Throughout Vietnam's long histoty, the central elite and peripheraI farming communities have been legaIly and culturally divided. This dichotomy was never as complete as the famous injunction that "the emperor's writ stops at the village gate" infers. InitiaIly, during the period of French colonisation and more recently since the introduction of doi moi (renovation) economic reforrns, central authorities have attempted to unify land management with universaI normative law.

Como resultado de la implementación de las políticas neoliberales en la región durante las dos últimas décadas, el problema de la tierra ha pretendido ser “archivado” no sólo en las políticas sectoriales sino también en las discusiones sobre el problema agrario y rural en general.

This study is based on research carried out during several periods from mid 1991 to mid 1995 in the ejido La Canoa in Jalisco, western Mexico, and in several government agencies. The study focuses in particular on the period between the 1930s and 1992 when the Mexican agrarian law was fundamentally changed. The last chapters of the book discuss the change of the agrarian law in 1992.

This bulletin is issued by FAO as a medium for the dissemination of information and views on land reform and related subjects to the United Nations, FAO Member Governments and national and international experts and institutions. Articles are published in the original language (English, French or Spanish).

This bulletin is issued by FAO as a medium for the dissemination of information and views on land reform and related subjects to the United Nations, FAO Member Governments and national and international experts and institutions. Articles are published in the original language (English, French or Spanish).

This issue of Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives includes interesting descriptions of land tenure and related policies in Uganda, Tunisia, the United Republic of Tanzania and Morocco. Two thought-provoking articles on access to land and other assets focus on policies to reduce poverty and the function of markets in the allocation of production resources. In the first, J. Melmed-Sanjak and S.