Insecure land tenure and property rights for women can contribute to the spread of HIV and to a weakened ability to cope with the consequences of AIDS. Land is a critical asset for the rural poor, and in most countries, men hold the rights to and control over land.

When contracts are incomplete, relationship-specific investments may be underprovided due to the threat of opportunistic expropriation or holdup. The authors find evidence of such underinvestment on tenanted land in rural Pakistan. Using data from households cultivating multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, they show that land-specific investment is lower on leased plots.

This report is a synthesis of information gleaned from four case studies of World Bank-financed land programs in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

China has undergone a profound economic and social transformation as it moves from a centrally-planned to a market-oriented economy.

Mixed evidence on the impact of formal title in much of Africa is often used to question the relevance of dealing with land policy issues in this continent.

To implement the vision of fostering
economic development, social equity, and a transparent and
effective government, the Government of Liberia has outlined
key transitions that need to be accomplished. These include
the development of infrastructure (roads, electricity),

This article aims to show how the Law 1448 of 2011, which explains reparation and restitution of victims, and the National Development Plan (NDP) 2011-2014 generate land concentration in Colombia -- This is due to how the NDP objectives disintegrate the Law 1448 objectives; this phenomenon could be explained using an agency model and the subsequent moral risk issue formed between the State and

The scope and urgency of the threats to
Nigeria's rural land are no secret. In 2005, a working
group dedicated to formulating a national agricultural land
policy began the process with a comprehensive articulation
of the challenges facing Nigeria's agricultural land.

The 2003 land law defines that the Land
Tenure Certificate (LTCs) carries both the wife's and
husband's names. Theoretically, the requirement of both
the wife's and husband's names on the LTCs aims at
enabling the wife to participate more actively in household

...with increasing frequency, land is taken from farmers, often with little or no compensation. Large swathes of farmland have already been made available to foreign-based companies in a process that appears to be accelerating.

This paper is motivated by the emphasis
on secure property rights as a determinant of economic
development in recent literature. The authors use village
and household level information from about 800 villages
throughout China to explore whether legal reform increased

Land reform can broadly be divided into
land tenure reform-the establishment of secure and
formalized property rights in land-and land
redistribution-the transfer of land from large to small
farmers. The paper is therefore divided into two chapters.