The aim of this paper is to give an overview and analyze the contemporary land tenure relations in Russia in view of their influences on economic viability of agricultural production. The paper investigates progress made toward the development of agricultural land market in economies in transition. The research is made with emphasis on Stavropol Krai, agricultural region in the southern part of Russia.

Groundwater is an increasingly important resource for urban and rural potable water supply, irrigated agriculture, and industry, in addition to its natural environmental role of sustaining river flows and aquatic ecosystems. But major changes in land use that impact groundwater are taking place, as a consequence of population growth, increasing and changing food demands, and expanding biofuel cultivation. The link between land use and groundwater has long been recognised, but has not been widely translated into integrated policies and practices.

This study examines the effects of land tenure systems on resource-use productivity and efficiency in the Upper East region of Ghana with data drawn from the Ghana Agricultural Production Survey. A stochastic frontier model is employed to analyse resource-use productivity and efficiency of the rice farms. The study establishes that rice farms under the various land tenure systems are technically inefficient. Technical efficiency for the pooled sample was 61.80%.

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe.

Although many contemporary studies of agriculture associate larger properties with higher relative productivity, this assumption has limited relevancy for the analysis of situations in which property owners profit more from large-scale property accumulation itself rather than any superiority in exploitation opportunities offered by increased size. In Brazil, the efficiency-of-scale paradigm has been used to criticize peasant agriculture as unproductive and hide contradictions deriving from land concentration.

The widespread acquisition of land for large-scale/commercial production of biofuel crops in Ghana has raised concerns from civil society organizations, local communities and other parties, regarding the impact of these investments on local livelihoods. This paper assessed the effect of large-scale acquisition of land for production of Jatropha curcas on farmers’ livelihoods in Ghana. The study was conducted in 11 communities spanning the major agro-ecological zones and political divisions across Ghana.

The paper uses three years of household farm plot panel data (2006-2009), covering six districts in central and southern Malawi to assess factor productivity and farming system development under the input subsidy program. All farm plots of the households were measured with GPS. Maize production intensified in this period as maize area shares of the total farm size were reduced while input use intensity and yields increased. Yields of improved maize were significantly (+323 kg/ha) higher than for local maize.

The importance of heterogenous land quality in determining slippage on corn production in North Carolina is quantitatively analyzed. Field-level analysis controls for the influence of land productivity from other factors to determine the significance of the land decisions on slippage. Results show that yield hikes from the diversion of low-quality land by farmers comprise a minor contribution to total increases in average yield.

agricultural productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), land productivity, labor productivity, International Development, International Relations/Trade, Production Economics, Productivity Analysis,

This study analyzes how market imperfections affect land productivity in a degraded low-potential cereal- livestock economy in the Ethiopian highlands. A wide array of variables is used to control for land quality in the analysis. Results of three different selection models were compared with least squares models using the HC3 heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator. Market imperfections in labor and land markets were found to affect land productivity. Land productivity was positively correlated with household male and female labor force per unit of land.

Land fragmentation is considered a major obstacle to the efficient use of land and other agricultural resources in Bulgaria. This study is concerned with formally testing the relationship between fragmentation of land plots and land productivity in the country. Multiple regression analysis and agricultural data obtained from the 2003 Bulgaria Multi-topic Household Survey is employed for the purpose. Results of the study suggest that the level of current fragmentation is relatively low and not likely to adversely affect land productivity.

Forests are one of the most important components of the global biosphere and have critical influences on the Earth’s ecological balance. Regularly updated forest cover information is necessary for various forest management applications as well as climate modeling studies. However, map products are not widely updated at continental or national scales because the current land cover products have overly coarse spatial resolution or insufficiently large training data sets.