This study attempts to identify the impacts of land tenure institutions on the efficiency of farm management based on a case study of smallholder rubber production in customary lands of Sumatra

This paper evaluates the effect (in terms of private returns) of investment in education on wages in the rural Philippines. Statistical endogeneity of education in the wage function may result from (1) unobserved determinants of education that also influence wages and/or (2) measurement error. Panel data are used that provide relevant instruments, particularly distance to schools and measures of household resources, at the time of schooling, to endogenize investments in education while estimating wage functions.

This paper suggests practical methods for assessing policy research programs, both ex post and ex ante. Measuring the benefits of policy research is difficult: the path of causation between research and policy change is nearly always uncertain; multiple factors influence any particular policy change; policies are diverse in nature as are their intended and actual effects; and some effects of policy research are not priced in the market. Many of the benefits of changes in policy stem from the reduced cost of welfare-improving institutional change.

Poverty in rural India has declined substantially in recent decades. This steady decline in poverty was strongly associated with agricultural growth, particularly the green revolution, which in turn was a response to massive public investments in agriculture and rural infrastructure. Public investment in rural areas has also benefitted the poor through its impact on the growth of the rural non-farm economy, and government expenditure on rural poverty and employment programs,which has grown rapidly, has directly benefitted the rural poor.

Using an agriculture-focused CGE model for Zimbabwe with 1991 as base period, this paper examines quantitatively the income and equity effects of trade liberalization in isolation and in conjunction with potentially complementary changes in fiscal and land policies. Trade policy reform alone (dismantling of import and foreign exchange controls, and reduction of import taxes to a low uniform rate) is shown to increase aggregate disposable household income significantly.

Explores how the institutions of property rights and collective action play a particularly important role in the application of technologies for agricultural and natural resource management.Technologies with long time frames tend to require tenure security to provide sufficient incentives for adoption, while those that operate on a large spatial scale will require collective action to coordinate.

Tanzania’s well-known village establishment programme, which is called Ujamaa , allowed for the sedentarization of almost all rural residents in some 8 000 villages in the 1970s. The effective impact of villagization on land distribution may vary, but a general preference for individual assignments of rights has been observed in nearly all cases under study, which is at least partially due to the track record of communal production in the framework of Ujamaa . Only 6 percent of the country’s total surface is under cultivation.

The present land tenure situation in Uganda is essentially the result of four factors: customary tenure practices, the mailo tenure system introduced under the British colonial administration, the Land Reform Decree passed by Idi Amin’s government in 1975, and the disrupting social order under the Amin regime and during the period following its downfall. The impacts of the Land Reform Decree and civil disobedience have led to the degradation of common property resources, particularly forest areas and pastures.

In this paper, the results of a recent case study of forest conservation and management in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, India are reported. Changes in land use, grazing, household fuelwood collection and inadequate management institutions are identified as key factors causing forest degradation. The paper demonstrates that quantitative analysis, employing data from fairly large samples of households and villages, is a useful supplement to the qualitative methods dominating in studies of conservation and natural resource management institutions.

The core thesis is that Western neoclassical economics and law (particularly Anglo-American) have a peculiar cultural history that biases Western-trained economists and lawyers against common property systems like those found among Africans and American Indians. This Western cultural bias is expressed through the recurrent focus on individuals as atomistic and independent of each other in contract and property law, as well as in economic theory.

The study identifies measures that have created property rights in the Danish, Dutch and UK fishery sector. Property in this respect is not considered as an asset in the stock of fish but as a stream of benefits, resulting from the right to fish. The limited access to the fishery by the vessel licence and by the recognition as a commercial fisherman have created two forms of property rights in the Danish fishery. In the Netherlands, the national TACs for the individual species have been transformed into transferable individual quota (ITQs).

In this study, an economywide model focused on Morocco's rural economy is used as a laboratory for analyzing issues at the core of such a rural development strategy.The model is used to explore the effects of alternative scenarios for water tariffs and sales, and supply-side advances (irrigation expansion, and accelerated productivity growth, both in agriculture and other sectors). Among these, instruments of tax policy and irrigation expansion are under the direct control of policymakers whereas other supply-side shifts are less directly influenced by government actions.