The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about investors causing a "global land rush". Large land deals can provide opportunities for better access to capital, transfer of technology, and advances in productivity and employment generation. But they...

Agriculture has made major contributions to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing on an 8-year panel of 1,200...

Albania's radical farmland distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient, and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to lay the foundation for greater...

Although transfer of agricultural land ownership through land reform had positive impacts on productivity, investment, and political empowerment in many cases, institutional arrangements in West Bengal - which made tenancy heritable and imposed a prohibition on subleasing - imply that early land...

Although a large literature discusses the productivity effects of land fragmentation, measurement and potential endogeneity issues are often overlooked. This paper uses several measures of fragmentation and controls for endogeneity and crop choice by looking at inherited paddy and wheat plots to...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...

Recent strong commodity prices have led to increased investor interest in farmland. Global analysis indicates that suitable land to bring into cultivation is available but concentrated in a limited number of land-abundant countries in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. In a much larger...

Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of a land tenure regularization program covering the entire country allows the use of administrative data to describe initial performance and combine the data with household surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent transfers remain informal, and how...

This paper disentangles different aspects of land fragmentation and its impact on the efficiency of resource use. The paper uses information on the incidence of crop shocks to assess whether fragmentation provides benefits in reducing risk and parcel coordinates and terrain-adjusted travel times...