The number of people in South Asia's cities rose by 130 million between 2000 and 2011--more than the entire population of Japan. This was linked to an improvement in productivity and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But the region's cities have struggled to cope with the pressure of population growth on land, housing, infrastructure, basic services, and the environment. As a result, urbanization in South Asia remains underleveraged in its ability to deliver widespread improvements in both prosperity and livability.

This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by connecting them to regulatory changes in India that affected real property. With this background, the study next quantifies the implications and determinants of factor and output misallocation.

Well-functioning urban land and housing markets are critical success factors for achieving robust economic growth. This paper provides an overview of urban land and housing market performance in Punjab Province of Pakistan. It describes the characteristics of well-functioning markets and argues that the Punjab's present markets are not performing adequately.

As countries increasingly strive to transform their economies from agriculture‐based into a diversified one, land rental will become of greater importance. It will thus be critical to complement research on the efficiency of specific land rental arrangements such as sharecropping with an inquiry into the broader productivity impacts of the land rental market. Plot‐level data for a matched landlord–tenant sample in an environment where sharecropping dominates allow us to explore both issues.

With the aim of promoting national food security, the Vietnamese government enforces the designation of around 35 per cent of agricultural land strictly for paddy rice cultivation. We investigate the economic effects of adjusting this policy, using an economy-wide model of Vietnam with detailed modelling of region-specific land use, agricultural activity, poverty and food security measures.

Enabling the Business of Agriculture 2016 provides a tool for policy makers to identify and analyze legal barriers for the business of agriculture and to quantify transaction costs of dealing with government regulations.

The Diagnostic Trade Integration Study identifies the following actions centered around four pillars to sustain and accelerate export growth: (1) breaking into new markets through a) better trade logistics to reduce delivery lags; as world markets become more competitive and newer products demand shorter lead times, to generate new sources of competitiveness and thereby enable market diversification; and b) better exploitation of regional trading opportunities in nearby growing and dynamic markets, especially East and South Asia; (2) breaking into new products through a) more neutral and ra

The growing awareness about the need to anticipate the future of land systems focuses on how well we understand the interactions between society and environmental processes within a complexity framework. A major barrier to understanding is insufficient attention given to long (multidecadal) temporal perspectives on complex system behavior that can provide insights through both analog and evolutionary approaches. Analogs are useful in generating typologies of generic system behavior, whereas evolutionary assessments provide insight into site-specific system properties.

Characterization of preexisting flora is an essential preliminary step for successful land rehabilitation projects. This descriptive study was undertaken in a fragmented, dry tropical forest region in Panama. Five different habitat types were selected: active pasture, 2-yr and 5-yr abandoned pastures, forested riparian zones, and a forest fragment. Species richness, density, basal area, dispersal modes, and phenology of trees as well as their uses were determined.

Motivated by the emphasis on secure property rights as a determinant of economic development in recent literature, we use village- and household-level information from about 800 villages throughout China to explore whether legal reform increased protection of land rights against unauthorized reallocation or expropriation with below-average compensation by the state.

This paper estimates farmers’ investment response to food price spikes using household panel data collected before and after the 2007/08 food price crisis in Indonesia. We found that an increase in farmers’ terms-of-trade allowed relatively large crop-producing farmers to increase their investments at both extensive and intensive margins. Food price spikes had a significant income effect among farmers whose production surplus is large for market sales.

The geo-economy presents Lebanon with
challenges associated with being a nexus for regional fault
lines and risks from its dependence on capital inflows.
Despite markedly improved security conditions since the
start of 2015, anxiety over regional turmoil and potential
spillover effectspersist. All the while, Lebanon continues
to be, by far, the largest host of Syrian refugees (in
proportion to the population). In addition, the economy’s