Groundbreaking judgments in Australia and Canada the 1990s reveal that Indigenous land rights depend on evidence of occupation law when British Crown asserted sovereignty. Looking back at earlier decisions, it is apparent they were not based facts, but prejudicial erroneous assumptions about peoples. In St. Catherine’s Milling (1888), Lord Watson said Ojibwe Indians solely goodwill Crown, a con...

Introduction This paper is provided as a background essay for the international workshop on Fundamental Rights in the Balance, to be held at IDS 16 -18 October. It reflects on key events, processes and publications emerging from donor engagement and research on issues of land and property rights, and land reform, over a five to six year period from mid-1997 up to the present day. The idea is to...

It’s difficult for China’s current land transfer institutions limited to county-wide to solve the contradiction between urban-rural development and construction land shortage. On the basis of analyzing China’s construction land transfer system, and evaluation toward Transfer of development rights (TDR) practices in Anhui and Chongqing, the passage proposes: (1) we should establish a multi-level...

1 Preliminary and quite incomplete. Please do not cite without permission. helpful comments. INTRODUCTION It has long been hypothesized that the quality of the economic institutions of a society has a fundamental impact on its prospects for economic growth and development. In particular, it is apparent that investment incentives depend upon expectations of rights over the returns to that invest...

— This paper uses data from the 2003/04 Cambodia Household Socioeconomic Survey to investigate the effects of property rights to land. Plots held with a paper documenting ownership in rural Cambodia are found to have higher productivity and land values than other plots, while property rights have weak effects on access to credit. The paper also investigates whether the introduction of private p...