This paper analyses some key findings emerged in the study of the Mayan community of S. Jos Sinach, located in the Guatemalan Highlands. The research highlights how colonial and post-colonial legislation influences the actual land tenure and hampers the development of the community. Little land ownership together with high demographic growth lead to insufficient crop production. As a consequence, human pressure on S. Jos forest and seasonal migration to sugar cane plantations of the Pacific Coast is carried out by householders in order to ensure subsistence to their families.

The government of Uganda is currently decentralizing many of its services including those directly related to agriculture and the environment. Non-government organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) are being asked to take the lead in the provision of government services such as agricultural extension during the transition to demand driven fee-for-service. This paper explores the role of government programs, NGOs and CBOs in the adoption of land management technologies.

This study presents an approach to analyzing decentralized forestry and naturalresource management and land property rights issues, and catalyzing collectiveaction among villages and district governments. It focuses on understanding thecurrent policies governing local people’s access to property rights and decisionmaking processes, and learning how collective action among community groups andinteraction among stakeholders can enhance local people’s rights over lands,resources, and policy processes for development.

In the second half of the last century, both India and China have undergone major transitions and have moved to more liberalized economies. This paper relates the observed patterns in regional inequality to major events during this period. Because of China’s institutional barriers to migration, regional inequality is much higher than in India. Also, China’s decentralization and opening up are closely related to the observed regional inequality - particularly the inland-coastal disparity - since the reform period.

Extension services are a keystone of information diffusion in agriculture. This paper exploits a large randomized controlled trial to track diffusion of a new technique in the classic Training and Visit (T&V) extension model, relative to a more direct training model. In both control and treatment communities, contact farmers (CFs) serve as points-of-contacts between agents and other farmers. The intervention (Treatment) aims to address two pitfalls of the T&V model: i) infrequent extension agent visits, and ii) poor quality information.

In less than fifty years, Brazil evolved from a predominantly rural society and economy to a highly urbanized country in which 85 percent of its people now live in urban areas and more than 90 percent of the country’s GDP is generated in the cities. This rapid urbanization process was characterized by a lack of planning and an enduring framework of inequality, resulting in high degrees of concentrated poverty in the urban areas. Much of this urbanization has taken place in metropolitan regions (MRs).

Ulaanbaatar's (UB) population has swollen from half a million in 2001 to approximately 1.2 million in 2011, accounting for over 40 percent of the country's population. This trend is likely to continue as economic growth is increasingly concentrated in UB. With its growing population and concerns in rising inequality, the city is facing increasing pressure to maintain and expand service provision (especially infrastructure). The local tax on wages is expected to continue to provide substantial revenues to the UB government, which will assist the growing demand for services.

As part of a national experiment in 2008, Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property rights reforms, including complete registration of all land together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate migration restrictions. A triple difference approach using the Statistics Bureau’s regular household panel suggests that the reforms increased consumption and income, especially for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation.

Cities emerge from the spatial concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial concentration is not enough; the economic viability of cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly across the urban area. This constant movement within dense cities creates wealth but also various degrees of unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and environmental degradation.

Cambodia emerged in the early 1990s from 30 years of conflict, the brutal Khmer Rouge era, and a decade of Vietnamese occupation, with one of the world’s lowest per-capita incomes, and with social indicators far behind those of neighboring Southeast Asian countries. Physical infrastructure had been largely destroyed. United Nations intervention led to a peace agreement in 1991, a new constitution, elections, and formation of a coalition government, although a reduced level of conflict and political instability continued until the late 1990s.

In the past 50 years, Indian agriculture has undergone a major transformation, from dependence on food aid to becoming a consistent net food exporter. The gradual reforms in the agricultural sector (following the broader macro-reforms of the early 1990s) spurred some unprecedented innovations and changes in the food sector driven by private investment. These impressive achievements must now be viewed in light of the policy and investment imperatives that lie ahead.