While land reform has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, most of the analyses have been at the aggregate level and focused on rather short-term effects. We use a listing of more than 90,000 households in some 200 villages in West Bengal to highlight the impact of the state's 1978...

Land reforms in India were aimed at securing access to land for poor rural households. We use data from West Bengal to highlight the impact of the state’s 1978 land reform program on human capital accumulation within the beneficiary households. The results from the study indicate that reform...

We use a survey of small rural enterprises from Tanzania to demonstrate quantitatively the economic importance of this sector and to identify participants' characteristics and obstacles to the sector's expansion and productivity. In stark contrast to most of the findings for the formal sector...

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of high inequality of opportunity due to a biased asset distribution has led to increased interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to the potential longer-term impacts of the measures used to implement such...

While recent studies point towards the importance of institutions, in particular secure property rights, as key determinants of economic growth, options to foster institutional change to make property rights more secure are not well understood. Data from 800 villages all over China on the...

We use a survey of small rural enterprises from Sri Lanka to demonstrate quantitatively the economic importance of this sector and to identify participants' characteristics and obstacles to the sector's expansion and productivity. Value added in the rural non-farm sector is estimated to amount...

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