The current framework of economic growth and development includes a general trend towards the privatization of land rights and a collapse of collective structures in agriculture as well as a move towards reliance on land markets as the means of peasant access to participation in the development process. Despite the removal of land reform as an explicit part of the policy agenda, it is clear that the situations which led to the activation of land reforms in past decades are still in place.

This study examines the land acquisition and distribution process of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) by analyzing the nature and extent of participation of the various government agencies. Attempts are also made in identifying the areas where land reform can be hastened. While there are opportunities for change, the paper concludes that the overall impact of these changes on land reform may not be as large in terms of area coverage.

Paper uses a new pre-1940 Third World data base documenting real wages and relative factor prices to explore their determinants. There are three possibilities: external price shocks, factor endowment changes, and technological change. As the paper's title suggests, technological change is an unlikely explanation. The paper lays out an explicit econometric agenda for the future, although more casual empiricism suggests that external price shocks were doing most of the work, and declining-transport-cost-induced commodity price convergence in particular.

The ultimately disappointing results of past redistributive reforms caused contemporary policy-makers in Latin America to search for alternatives. In recent years, the issue of transforming tenure structure through the market mechanism has moved into the spotlight. This paper argues that it is extremely helpful to approach the topic from an institutional perspective. The institution of property rights is central to the discussion. New questions emerge: How are transactions actually being carried out in the rural setting?

Policy Brief 41
by Ruth Hall

In this paper, the results of a recent case study of forest conservation and management in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan, India are reported. Changes in land use, grazing, household fuelwood collection and inadequate management institutions are identified as key factors causing forest degradation. The paper demonstrates that quantitative analysis, employing data from fairly large samples of households and villages, is a useful supplement to the qualitative methods dominating in studies of conservation and natural resource management institutions.

Examining the assumption that private property rights create incentives for the management of resources, this paper argues that private property rights and current wildlife conservation and management laws and policies in Kenya fail to provide the solution to wildlife biodiversity erosion.

The subject of this article is the alleged inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in developing countries. The recent controversy is reviewed, and a framework is provided to explain the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfections in the markets for labor, credit and land. On this basis testable hypotheses are derived. Using farm-level panel data from Pakistan, the framework is assessed by regressing output on operational farm size, size of owned holding, family size, tenurial status and irrigation status of the land.

Attempts at settling or sedentarizing nomadic herders in semi-arid and arid regions have been largely unsuccessful, partly on account of the difficulty of restricting the movements of domestic livestock in areas where low and irregular rainfall lead to scant and unreliable sources of water and grazing. But for the herders in sub-humid regions, where both water and vegetation resources are much more reliable and substantial, there appear to be different possibilities.

Paper examines domestic energy supply and demand in Northwest India. A household model is set up to analyse the links between forest scarcity and household energy consumption, focusing on the substitution of fuels from the forests and commons and the private domain. The model is estimated using recently collected data from villages bordering Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, India. A novel maximum entropy approach is used for estimation.

Understanding factors affecting farmers’ adoption of improved technologies is critical to success of conservation agriculture (CA) program implementation. This study, which explored the factors that determine adoption and extent of farmers’ use of the three principles of CA (i.e., minimum soil disturbance, permanent soil cover with crop residues, and crop rotations), was conducted in 10 target communities in 8 extension planning areas in Malawi. The primary data was collected using structured questionnaires administered to individual households.

Report on a donor consultative meeting at the World Bank on land policy lessons learned and new challenges for the World Bank’s development agenda. Contains background, areas of donor agreement, outstanding issues and outcomes. The greatest controversy continued to centre around market assisted land reform.