Agricultural tenancy reforms have been widely enacted, but evidence on their long-run impact remains limited. In this paper, we provide such evidence by exploiting the quasirandom assignment of linguistically similar areas to different South Indian states that subsequently varied in tenancy regulation policies. Given imperfect credit markets, the impact of tenancy reform should vary by househol...

Increasingly developing world governments are being re-structured to improve governance and to alleviate poverty, and this also applies to government departments associated with the registration and cadastral systems. The link between cadastral reform, good governance and poverty alleviation will be explored by reviewing some of the recent thinking in this area, and by drawing on experience wit...

This paper was published in June 2003 as a chapter in: Roth, Michael, and Gonese, Francis eds. 2003. Delivering Land and Securing Rural Livelihoods: Post-Independence Land Reform and Resettlement in Zimbabwe. 2 Harare and Madison: Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe, and Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. http://www.wisc.edu/ltc/zimbabwe/zimbooktoc.html ...

The land tenure reform is the key to sustainable development in rural China. Without challenging the collective ownership of land, the land shareholding cooperative (LSC) system came into being and is being strongly endorsed by the authority: It re-collectivizes the contracted land from peasants and enables better regional planning and large-scale modern agricultural production. This paper stud...

This paper examines the impact of a land reform in Viet Nam which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit and mortgage their land-use rights. We expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of households. Our difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes advantage of the variation across provinc...

We study the effect of improvements in peasants’ property rights launched by the Stolypin reform on agricultural productivity in early 20 century Russia. We find that the enclosure component of the reform caused an increase in land productivity. We argue that this effect is mainly driven by better usage rights and not because of economies of scale or better tenure security. In addition, we find...

This chapter provides a historical perspective on the relationship between land and confl ict in Colombia, in which land is identifi ed as both a source and resource of confl ict. This relationship is central to understanding forced displacement in Colombia and this study argues that in light of signifi cant shortfalls in translating state policy on land and IDPs into practice, humanitarian age...

Land has been nationalised in Mozambique since Independence in 1975, despite the new 1990 Constitution which specified a market economy. Recent national land reform in 1997 maintained state custodianship of land, with usufruct titles, however land is becoming increasingly commodified – especially in the capital city, Maputo. This paper draws on research undertaken by the author in 1998/99 which...

1 The term reform is used for a wide range of changes, including some which increase the concentration of land. Here the discussion is limited to cases in which an increase in the number of families with access to enough land to helo them avoid poverty is at least a reasonably likely result, since otherwise it would not be expected to contribute to prevention of agriculture-related emergencies....

This series is published by ODI, an independent non-profit policy research institute, with financial support from the Department for International Development (formerly the Overseas Development Administration). Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of either ODI or DFID. DFID Department for Internat ional Development REDISTRIBUTIVE LAND REFORM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Martin Adams a...