The pre-reform period was characterized by state monopoly of land and by land use that did not require any payment. The legal principles of land reform in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union were set in 1989 by the Basic Law on Land Legislation in the USSR and the Soviet Republics. This law established the right of the citizens to receive land in permanent or temporary use for agricu...

The wet, warm West Coast climate favours tree production and pastures. Much of the land remains in indigenous forest under the control of Government agencies. In the more accessible parts of this land, and in land held under private ownership, we explore the feasibility of “farming” two examples of native biodiversity. Sphagnum moss production varies with location and differences in mesoand mic...

The lack of land ownership can discourage agricultural technology adoption, yet there is scarce evidence of the impact of land rental contracts on the adoption of improved crop varieties in developing countries. The current study investigates such impact using a nationally representative survey of Ethiopian maize farmers. In contrast to many previous studies, we show in a simple model that cash...

Previous studies of tenancy and land reform programs suggest that these programs substantially increased agricultural productivity. However, these studies are limited to sharecropping environments. This paper investigates the productivity effect of the 1953 land ownership transfer program in Taiwan, where fixed-rental contracts predominated. This program transferred 27% of the paddy land to inc...

The southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis, is a major threat to pine forest health in the South, and is expected to play an increasingly important role in the future of the South’s pine forests (Ward and Mistretta 2002). Once a forest stand is infected with southern pine beetle (SPB), elimination and isolation of the infested and immediately surrounding trees is required to control the o...

We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are significant gains (of about 0.3 years for males) in the immediate post-reform generation, their magnitude pales in comparison to second-generation e...

Using the Survey of Living Conditions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar of India and the second round of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, this paper examines whether and to what extent rural consumption inequality of the poor differs in the two countries. While these two countries have experienced significant growth since the early 1990s, they have different institutional arrangements. As a result...

— Using original data from an area of Zambia with contrasting tenure regimes (state and customary), the hypotheses are tested whether farmers with leases or titles have superior fixed investment and productivity to those without documentation. Results indicate that documentation is indeed associated with greater fixed investment independently of an array of control variables. Productivity also ...