Land rights for women are important to
women's overall role in the household economy. In most
Europe and Central Asia (ECA) countries, women have equal
rights to land by law, but practice varies widely across the
region. Improving gender outcomes in land administration is
therefore related more to education and the need to change
norms and habits than it is to a specific legislative
problem. Access to gender-disaggregated data and the

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative

Mauritania is a vast country covering
over a million square kilometers, where a relatively small
population of 3.5 million people lives on just one-fifth of
the country’s total area. With extremely advanced
desertification, the country is particularly vulnerable to
the impact of climate change and other external shocks. The
main sources of income in Mauritania are agriculture, which
is either irrigated or rain-fed, and livestock. This is

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 of a short-term nature and that
little land was transferred from very large to small land
owners or the landless suggests that there may be scope for

Land tenure security is crucial for
women's empowerment and a prerequisite for building
secure and resilient communities. Tenure is affected by many
and often contradictory sets of rules, laws, customs,
traditions, and perceptions. For most rural women, land
tenure is complicated, with access and ownership often
layered with barriers present in their daily realities:
discriminatory social dynamics and strata, unresponsive

Ensuring food security under changing
climate conditions is one of the major challenges of our
era. Agriculture must not only become increasingly
productive, but must also adapt to climate change while
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Soil carbon
sequestration, the process by which atmospheric carbon
dioxide is taken up by plants through photosynthesis and
stored as carbon in biomass and soils, can support these

Using census data from the Censo
Agropecuario 1995-96, the authors map indicators of current
land use, and agricultural productivity across Brazil's
Legal Amazon, These data permit geographical resolution
about ten times finer than afforded by "municipio"
data, used in previous studies. The authors focus on the
extent, and productivity of pasture, the dominant land use
in Amazonia today. Simple tabulations suggest that most

This sourcebook is intended to be a
ready reference for practitioners (including World Bank
stakeholders, clients in borrowing countries, and World Bank
project leaders) seeking state-of-the-art information about
good land management approaches, innovations for
investments, and close monitoring for potential scaling up.
This sourcebook is divided into three parts: the first part
identifies the need and scope for sustainable land

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

Land area is a fundamental component of
agricultural statistics, and of analyses undertaken by
agricultural economists. While household surveys in
developing countries have traditionally relied on
farmers' own, potentially error-prone, land area
assessments, the availability of affordable and reliable
Global Positioning System (GPS) units has made GPS-based
area measurement a practical alternative. Nonetheless, in an

The main focus of this book is land
redistribution. To forge greater consensus among
practitioners of land reform, and to enable them to make
better choices among the many options, the book describes
and analyzes alternative broad paths of implementation,
using examples and the detailed implementation mechanisms
that were used in those examples. The objectives of this
book are to review and analyze: a) the growing consensus on

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land