During the last three decades, developing countries have made enormous strides in opening up their protected domestic markets to international trade and foreign investment. Yet most countries have not simply opened up their markets. They have also instituted a range of policies to encourage...

Tree crops have changed land tenure in Africa. Planters have acquired more permanent, alienable rights, but have also faced disputes with competing claimants and the state. I show that the introduction of Para rubber had similar effects in the Benin region of colonial Nigeria. Planters initially...

The role of property rights in resource allocation has been one of the central themes in development economics. There exists extensive theoretical arguments that property rights in land are closely associated with the productive efficiency of agricultural resources as well as investment...

This article develops a theoretical framework to examine the relationship between land tenure agreements and households’ investment in land improvement and conservation measures. It then analyzes this relationship with a multivariate probit model based on a survey data from a sample of 560...

I show how abundant land and scarce labor shaped African institutions before colonial rule. I present a model in which exogenous land quality and endogenously evolving population determine the existence of land rights, slavery, and polygyny. I use cross-sectional data on pre-colonial African...

The ``land abundance'' view of African history uses sparse population to explain economic institutions. I provide supporting evidence from the Egba of Nigeria. I use early colonial court records to show that Egba institutions fit the theory's predictions. Before 1914, the Egba had poorly defined...

The knowledge of social stratification within the peasantry is a decisive precondition of sustainable economic and political measures for an effective support of agricultural production in least developed countries. This is one of the reasons why also in Nigeria social scientist focus on the...

Food problem became more severe after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, presenting a series challenges to India’s agricultural sector. Even during good harvest years, food imports remain high. A large segment of people were poor. To mitigate these problems, India adopted farming...

The unorganised workers account for about 93 per cent of the total workforce and there is a steady growth in it over years in India. It is argued that India had a long tradition of informal social security and social assistance system directed particularly towards the more vulnerable sections of...

Food security is about ensuring that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to the basic food they need. In a number of African countries chronic malnutrition and transitory food insecurity are pervasive. Like most African countries, Eritrea is also a victim of the...