Congressional Briefing hosted by Congresswoman Betty McCollum on March, 28 2014Remarks by Dr. Gregory Myers, Land Tenure and Property Rights Division Chief, USAID (as written)
First, I would like to thank Congresswoman McCollum for hosting this event and ActionAid for organizing and bringing all of us together for this important briefing. I would also like to thank Congresswoman McCollum’s staff for their attention to these critical issues.

March 2014 – Inheritance is the overwhelming way land is acquired in India, but societal practices exclude women from inheriting land. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, an inheritance law that covers 83.6% of the population of India, corrected some fundamental inequalities in the law bringing the women in equal status to men in the right to inherit land. However, eight years after its enactment, the ground reality is that women still do not inherit land on an equal basis with men.

USAID Land Tenure and Property Rights Division Chief Dr. Gregory Myers's Remarks from Partners’ Support to the Voluntary Guidelines & Land Governance: Exploiting Synergies & Measuring Impact. Remarks posted as written.

A guest post by Dr. Steven Lawry, Global Lead, Land Tenure & Property Rights, DAI
A recent systematic review—funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID)—of quantitative and qualitative literature on the effects of tenure formalization in developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, confirmed theories that formal registration of individual land rights increases investment, productivity, and household consumption.

A guest post by Zemen Haddis Gebeyehu, Senior Agriculture Policy Advisor, USAID/Ethiopia

This week, the World Bank will host its annual Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington, DC. The theme of the conference is “Integrating Land Governance into the Post-2015 Agenda: Harnessing Synergies for Implementation and Monitoring Impact.”
Throughout the week, USAID staff will chair several sessions, including:

A guest post by Nayna J Jhaveri, Ph.D., Resource Tenure Specialist, Tetra Tech

Air cargo origin destination flows in
the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region are heavily
concentrated in the largest economies of South America and
Mexico. With 32.7 percent of the airfreight moved to, from,
and within the region, Brazil is the largest cargo market,
followed by Colombia and Mexico, with 17.9 percent and 16.0
percent, respectively. The relatively small size of the air
cargo market in LAC can be explained by: (i) low levels of

To facilitate air freight, landlocked
countries need to improve operations at their airports and
liberalize access for foreign airlines. But until those
countries become major exporters, it is unlikely that
scheduled air cargo operators will have significant
operations. Instead, most air cargo will move as belly cargo
on passenger airlines, with some complementary use of
chartered air freighters during shipment peaks. Landlocked

This paper covers the most commonly used
means to charge road users, including fuel taxes, vehicle
taxes, vignettes and tolls. It presents a brief survey of
road user charging systems in selected European countries
and a more detailed overview of current status and
perspectives of road user charges in Poland. Consideration
is also given to private financing of roads through
different forms of public-private partnerships (PPP),

This paper reviews the performance of
railway concessions in Latin America over the period
extending from the initial Argentina concessions in
1991-1993 through 2004. The bulk of the concessioning
processes described herein were supported by the World Bank.
Now over a decade since rail concessioning in Latin America
began, the overall assessment of its results is positive,
particularly for freight railways. Railway traffic volumes

A guest post by Dr. Daniel Monchuk, Agricultural Economist, Cloudburst Group; Dr. Cynthia M. Caron, Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change, Clark University; and Stephanie Fenner, IDCE Fellow, Clark University