Given the year on year decrease of rural farmland and various forms of land degradation through the intrusion of non-farm land uses, the government of Bangladesh has drafted the agrarian reform strategies, primarily to protect the agricultural land from encroachment, conversion, and indiscriminate use. The draft Agricultural Land Protection and Land Use Bill since its inception in 2011 is facin...

This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality, incorporating indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. An intra-household model of joint production explains how divisions and land transactions emerge to avoid inefficient free-riding, and how they are affected by land reform and growth in household size. These...

This article presents a case of using property rights to govern land use in the high country of New Zealand’s South Island. It tells the story of a land reform policy and its implementation over two decades, through changes in rules and governing parties. It observes land reform outcomes that are surprisingly favourable to pastoral leaseholders, and surprisingly unfavourable to the Crown. It th...

This chapter focuses on the rural dimensions of the ‘two economies’ debate, and in particular on the question of what contribution land and agrarian reform can make to reducing inequality and addressing the structural nature of rural poverty in post-apartheid South Africa. It suggests that the problem needs to be conceptualised in terms of an ‘agrarian question of the dispossessed’, that can on...

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...

This paper investigates the issue of child labor in the context of land reforms in transition economies, using farm household data from the Republic of Georgia. The results show that an increase in landholdings as an outcome of the land reform can, in the presence of market imperfections, lead to an increase in child labor. This is because the increased demand for labor on the family farm is st...

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...