This Decree consisting of 55 articles aims at regulating the agricultural land reclamation in Syria. Part I deals with the rules for the Agricultural Land Reclamation while Part II deals with the Distribution of irrigated reclaimed land. Article 1 states that the Minister of Irrigation may, in accordance with the Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform and after taking the opinion of the General Union of Farmers, declare a public benefit in the reclamation of lands in any area of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The purpose of this Act, consisting of 123 sections divided into three Parts and four Schedules, is to give effect to certain provisions of the deed ofsettlement, which is a deed thatsettlesthe historical claims of Ngāti Pāhauwera.

While climate change is likely to
increase weather risks in many developing countries, there
is little evidence on effective policies to facilitate
adaptation. This paper presents experimental evidence on a
program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving
households' risk-management through income
diversification. The intervention targeted agricultural
households exposed to weather shocks related to changes in

Over the coming decades, land policy and
administration, for urban as well as rural areas, will be
critical for Ethiopia's development. The vast majority
of people making up the Federal Democratic Republic of
Ethiopia's (FDRE) predominantly agricultural economy
live in rural areas. Finally, land policies and
administration can contribute significantly to the
objectives of promoting gender equality and protecting

The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural
commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about
investors causing a "global land rush". Large land
deals can provide opportunities for better access to
capital, transfer of technology, and advances in
productivity and employment generation. But they carry risks
of dispossession and loss of livelihoods, corruption,
deterioration in local food security, environmental damage,

This is the second part of land studies
on Northern Uganda designed to inform the Peace, Recovery
and Development Plan (PRDP). This second part of the study,
undertaken during the second half of 2007 in the Lango and
Acholi regions, builds on the first phase conducted in 2006
in the Teso region. This second study has been designed to
present a more quantitative analysis of trends on disputes
and claims on land before displacement, during displacement

Agriculture has made major contributions
to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but
the literature has rarely focused on the institutional
factors that might underpin such structural transformation
and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing
on an 8-year panel of 1,200 households in six key provinces,
it explores the impact of government land reallocations and
formal land-use certificates on agricultural productivity

Although increased global demand for
land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
models to address these issues quickly and at the required
scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the

Despite strong beliefs that property
titling and registration will enhance credit access,
empirical evidence in support of such effects remains scant.
The gradual roll-out of computerization of land registry
systems across Andhra Pradesh's 387 sub-registry
offices allows us to combine quarterly administrative data
on credit disbursed by all commercial banks for an
eleven-year period (1997-2007) aggregated to the

Land assets have become an important
source of financing capital investments by subnational
governments in developing countries. Land assets, often with
billions of dollars per transaction, rival and sometimes
surpass subnational borrowing or fiscal transfers for
capital spending. While reducing the uncertainty surrounding
future debt repayment capacity, the use of land-based
revenues for financing infrastructure can entail substantial

This paper uses a rural household survey
dataset collected in 2006 and 2008 to investigate the impact
of a market-based land resettlement project in southern
Malawi. The program provided a conditional cash and land
transfer to poor families to relocate to larger plots of
farm land. The average treatment effect of the program is
estimated using a difference-in-difference matching
technique based on propensity score matching; qualitative

The majority of firms in most developing
countries are informal. The authors of this paper conducted
a field experiment in Sri Lanka that provided incentives for
informal firms to formalize. Offering only information about
the registration process and reimbursement for direct
registration costs had no impact on formalization. Adding
payments equivalent to one-half to one month's profits
for the median firm led to registration of around one-fifth