Rural poverty remains widespread and persistent in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. A group of leading experts critically examines the impact of land tenure reforms on poverty reduction and natural resource management in countries in Africa and Asia with highly diverse historical contexts.

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...

The authors use data from Ethiopia to empirically assess determinants of participation in land rental markets, compare these to those of administrative land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact of households' expectations regarding future redistribution. Results indicate that...

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...

This book aims to provide key pieces of information needed for informed debate about large-scale land acquisition by drawing on the experience from past land expansions, discussing predictions for potential future demand, and providing empirical evidence of what is happening on the ground in the...

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...