Recent international experience has shown that excessively complex administrative procedures, required to establish, and operate a business, discourage inflows of foreign direct investment. The authors present a new database on the administrative costs faced by private investors in 32 developing countries.

Economic development has brought about,
the decline in contribution of the agricultural sector to
the economy of Sri Lanka, and, consistent with this economic
transformation, the structure of employment also changed.
Thus, as labor migrates away from agriculture, the
productivity, for those who remain in the land, needs to
increase significantly. This report examines the constraints
to promoting more rapid agricultural, and rural non-farm

This handbook is intended for agro-commodity companies that want to better manage supply chain environmental and social risks. The Handbook focuses on five major agro-commodity supply chains—palm oil, soy, sugarcane, cocoa, and coffee—but many of the tools, resources, and case studies can be used as guidance for other agro-commodities.

It has often been stated that land fragmentation and farm structures characterized by small agricultural holdings and farms divided in a large number of parcels have been the side-effect of land reform in Central and Eastern Europe. This article reports the findings of a study of land reform in 25 countries in the region from 1989 and onwards and provides an overview of applied land reform approaches. With a basis in theory on land fragmentation, the linkage between land reform approaches and land fragmentation is explored.

Evaluation and assessment of land administration system (LAS) has been getting more attention over the last few years. Different assessment approaches have been tried across land administration systems at international level to assess the performance of these systems, but the attention is given to only those parameters which are common to all these systems. In some cases, legal and technical parameters are considered while institutional and organisational parameters got more attention in others.

The Government of the Gambia has acknowledged that a prudent and sustainable management of the country‟s limited land resources is an essential precondition to poverty reduction and national food security. A critical step towards the realization of current national strategic objectives
would be an evaluation of the land governance environment to determine where the country stands. In order to evaluate and prioritize these issues more systematically, country experts utilized the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) developed by the World Bank and its

The concept of “property”, usually studied under private law, has suffered internal (the social function as an essential element of the institution) and external (the administrative limitations) changes. As a result of these changes, the concept of property should be studied under the public law´s approach and method. An issue of utmost importance to public law is that it be properly and adequately articulated by the administrative authorities in order to protect the citizens’ rights.

This paper uses District Land and Housing Tribunal (DLHT) as a case study to argue that the principle conceived in the enactment of the law that established the tribunal is far from becoming a reality. It uses data of the past four years to demonstrate that DLHT is overburdened by increment of an average of 2000 pending cases every year. It further shows legal and practical challenges that hinder access to and independence of DLHT. The paper calls for drastic strategic measures to strengthen DLHT in terms of human resources and facilities.

This paper looks at Valuation as an important component of land administration that has outgrown the land sector gradually becoming an independent professional discipline much to the chagrin of its hosts – the land administration. Valuation as a profession originated in the actual sale transactions in medieval Europe where buyers relied on experienced interventionists in the land/real estate market to advise on the size and buying price of real properties. Its eventual introduction to university curriculum has been diverse amongst different regions and at varying momentum.

The history of surveys and mapping in Tanzania has been influenced by two European cultures through its colonization; first by the German and then by the British. During the German Administration, surveys and mapping activities were carried out by the Department of Surveys and Agriculture from 1893 to 1914. When the British took over the mandate for the territory after World War I, the also used the “old” German maps until when they when they started the surveys to produce other topographic maps from 1946. In 1961, the Surveys and Mapping Division was created.

The cadastral system in Kenya was established in 1903 to cater for land alienation for the white settlers. Since then, a hundred years later, the structure of the system has remained more or less the same despite major changes in surveying technology. The government of Kenya has realized that the current structure is not conducive to economic demands of the 21st century and is interested in re-organizing the structure in line with the current constitutional dispensation and new paradigms in land management.

This is covers land administration and
reform in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is highly relevant to all
developing countries around the world. It provides simple
practical steps to turn the hugely controversial subject of
"land grabs" into a development opportunity by
improving land governance to reduce the risks of
dispossessing poor landholders while ensuring mutually
beneficial investors' deals. This book shows how Sub