This paper examines the current wave of land tenure reform in eastern and southern Africa. It discusses how far tenure reform reflects a shift in powers over property from centre to periphery. A central question is whether tenure reform is designed to deliver to rural smallholders greater security of tenure and greater control over the regulation and transfer of these rights.Policy conclusions include:whilst diverse in initial objective, and uneven in delivery, tenure reforms address a remarkably common set of concerns.

The poor adapt and learn to live with poverty in a variety of ways. They also try to cope with shocks from events such as droughts, floods and loss of employment. Environmental resources play a vital role in their survival strategies. As the poor depend on environmental resources, one can expect them to have a stake in their preservation. Much of the damage done to natural resources is by others. Thus deforestation is much more an outcome of commercial logging for timber than fuelwood gathering by the poor.

In urban areas of Cote d'Ivoire, human capital is the endowment that best explains welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital especially the amount of land and farm equipment owned matters most.Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped poverty.Yet this distinction is of crucial policy importance.

At 3 to 4 percent a year, the displacement rate for the Slovenian labor force in 1990 93 was higher than that for the North American labor force during a major recession in the 1980s. But patterns of displacement were similar.Unusually rich administrative data sets covering both firms and workers enabled Orazem, Vodopivec, and Wu to study displacement in Slovenia during 1987 93.They describe displacement trends and the characteristics of displaced workers, comparing them to those in North America during a major recession.

Wage levels are an issue of concern across the globe as individuals, companies and governments wrestle with how wages paid to workers relate to costs of living, corporate and national competitiveness, profitability and broader macroeconomic trends and challenges.

This report examines wages in the tea industry with a focus in three case study areas: Malawi, West Java (Indonesia) and Assam (India). It looks at hired labour on plantations and, in particular, tea pluckers. 

Explores how the institutions of property rights and collective action play a particularly important role in the application of technologies for agricultural and natural resource management.Technologies with long time frames tend to require tenure security to provide sufficient incentives for adoption, while those that operate on a large spatial scale will require collective action to coordinate.

The application of the incremental cost assessment to biodiversity has always been uncertain. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the concept is a workable one in biodiversity. This paper has a twofold aim:1. to make explicit the strategic and logical approach to incremental cost assessment- to demonstrate that it is replicable and applicable to all GEF projects2. to apply this strategic and logical approach to specific case examples (or paradigm cases)
- these paradigms will provide operational guidance at the more practical level

The study was conducted to determine whether the gender difference in wealth and land allocation between male and female farmers in male-headed households is manifested in soil fertility indicators. It determined chemical fertility levels (fertility indicators) in the composite topsoil samples from 5 woman-owned plots and 5 man-owned plots in Ntanzi village, Uganda, on a Rhodic Ferralsol. A similar study was conducted on 8 woman-owned and 8 man-owned plots in Buggala Island, Uganda, on a Ferralic Arenosol.

The move towards decentralisation of resource control and management promises more efficient, equitable and sustainable resource use. Debate centres on what type of institutional arrangement in a given context is most appropriate and will lead to the fulfilment of the above ideal. Aspects of these arrangements include property rights structures as well as organisational structures.

Development economists have long aimed to identify programs and policies that can, by simultaneously improving equity and efficiency, foster sustainable growth. Land reform provides a classical example for such a programme.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how projects could be designed to address land degradation through the four focal areas; with special reference to incremental costs assessment. Approaches the question from a generic form through to specific examples.

This paper is about Untouchable ancestors' strong emotional attachment to their ancestral land. Ancestrors of Untouchables remain in their ancestral land at the margin of the village, whereas ancestors of high castes leave for the abode of ancestors, after expiating their sins by transferring them to Untouchables. Since land became a saleable commodity during the nineteenth century, many high caste people became the owners of marginal lands. This trend culminated in land reforms, which officially turned the "landless agricultural labourers" in to landowners.