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...

In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the...

This paper pilots an approach to identifying, categorizing, and mapping public land owned by the central, state, and local government in urban developed areas of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. The methodology uses information on plot sizes, location, and ownership that is publicly available for all...

In the 1980s the Thai government tried to legalize squatters by issuing special titles that restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997, the author finds that in places where these government titles where issued, leased plots are more...

The authors examine the impact of land reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term investments on the part of...

The authors develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor market. In this case, decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative...

The authors review longitudinal village studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to identify changes in living standards in rural India in recent decades. They scrutinize the main forces of economic changes--agricultural intensification, changes in land relations, and occupational...

Based on a large survey to compare the effectiveness of land markets and land reform in Colombia, the authors find that rental and sales markets were more effective in transferring land to poor but productive producers than was administrative land reform. The fact that land transactions were all...

The decollectivization of agriculture in Vietnam was a crucial step in the country's transition to a market economy. But the assignment of land use rights had to be decentralized, and local cadres ostensibly had the power to corrupt this process. The authors assess the realized land...

Immediately after World War II, drastic agricultural land reform was implemented in Japan. This reform has been considered one of the most successful agrarian reform projects in the world. It is often said that the reform gave former tenant farmers new incentives, which contributed to the rapid...