This chapter develops a unified analytical framework, drawing on and extending the existing literatureon the subject, for studying the role of property rights in economic development. Itaddresses two fundamental and related questions concerning the relationship between propertyrights and...

In this paper we review as well as contribute to the empirical literature on the impact of landreform on agricultural productivity in India. We find that, overall for all states, land-reform legislation had anegative and significant effect on agricultural productivity. However, this hides...

The well-known inverse relationship between farm size and productivity is usually explained in terms ofdiminishing returns with respect to land and other inputs coupled with various types of market frictions thatprevent the efficient allocation of land across farms. We show that even in the...

The experience of West Bengal under the panchayat system stands in sharp contrast withthat of other states and, together with land reform, it has been credited for playing animportant role in the impressive economic turnaround of the state since the mid 1980s. WestBengal is the first and the...

This paper explores the consequences of creating and improvingproperty rights so that …xed assets can be used as collateral. Thishas become a cause célèbre of Hernando de Soto whose views areinfluential in debates about policy reform concerning property rights.Hence, we refer to the economic...