In agrarian societies land serves as the main means not only for generating a livelihood but often also for accumulating wealth and transferring it between generations. How land rights are assigned therefore determines households'ability to generate subsistence and income, their social and...

Political outcomes - such as agricultural taxation, subsidization, and the provision of public goods - result from political bargaining among interest groups. Such bargaining is likely to be efficiency-enhancing and growth-enhancing when equally powerful interest groups - aware of the...

The authors use a large panel data set from Zambia to examine factors that could explain the relatively lackluster performance of the country's agricultural sector after liberalization. Zambia's liberalization significantly opened the economy but failed to alter the structure of productionor...

The authors use evidence from a survey of about 1200 beneficiaries of South African land reform to assess the performance of the initial phase of the land reform program. They find that the program has not lived up to the quantitative goals set, but did successfully target the poor. It has led...

Most work on the relationship between farm size and productivity strongly suggests that farms that rely mostly on family labor are more productive than large farms operated primarily by hired labor. This study began as an inquiry into how rental and sales markets for agricultural land in the...

The extent to which households should be allowed to transfer their land rights in post-socialist transition economies is of considerable policy interest. The authors use data from Vietnam, a transition country that allows rental and sales of land use rights, to identify factors conducive to the...

Increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad-based development in the...

The authors use a large data set from Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land-related investment and its possible impact on productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity of investment in trees, this is not...

The importance of land rental for overall economic development has long been recognized in theory, yet empirical evidence on the productivity and equity impacts of such markets and the extent to which they realize their potential has been scant. Representative data from China's nine most...

Whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in Rwanda, where policy...