This article reviews China's land tenure system, which is featured with differential treatment of rural and urban citizens with respect to three types of land tenure: urban land tenure, arable land tenure and rural residential land tenure. With the urban residents fully participated in the...

The most notable, or at least the most noted, form of property evolution has been the transfer of exclusive rights from collectives to individuals and vice versa, such as the farm collectivization in Soviet Union and the establishment of the People's Communes in Mao's China and their reversals....

Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 Revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This...

Land reform will not just reduce rural poverty, write development officials. It can raise productivity. It can promote civic engagement. Scholars routinely concur. Land reform may not always raise productivity and civic engagement, but it can - and during 1947-50 in occupied Japan it did. This...

The object of this essay is to describe and analyse contractual relations in two villages in North-east Bihar at a time when the so-called ‘green revolution’ promised much and the region had just started to benefit from canal irrigation. It is against this historical background that I will...

About forty lakh hectare of land is under cotton cultivation in Maharashtra. Once known as the prosperous cotton-belt; today the irony is that the state tops the list when it comes to suicides by farmers. Further, almost all of them are cotton farmers mostly from Vidarbha. At present, Vidarbha...

This paper uses provincial macro-data from the mid-1980s onwards to investigate the determinants of land-use choice in rural China, by paying a particular attention to the decision to plant trees as competing with agriculture. The evidence supports the importance of economic motivations in the...

This study uses rainfall variation as an instrumental variable for padi-rice production to estimate the impact of poverty on different types of crime across British colonies in South and South East Asia (1910-1940). Using original primary sources retrieved from annual administrative and...

Massive use of pesticides is one of the major environmental problems in developing countries. I analyse the correlation between land ownership and use of pesticides in the Mekong Delta. On the one hand, the negative effects of pesticides on the long-run soil productivity should discourage owners...