China has undergone a profound economic and social transformation as it moves from a centrally-planned to a market-oriented economy. Land issues are implicated in this ongoing transformation in numerous important ways - as key factors in China's quest for economic growth, national food security and social stability; as important influences in the rapid growth of China's cities as well as the future of its agriculture; and as central features in local government finance and in the growth and stability of the financial and banking sector.

The authors use a large data set from
Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and
transferability to explore determinants of different types
of land-related investment and its possible impact on
productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity
of investment in trees, this is not the case for terraces.
Transfer rights are unambiguously investment-enhancing. The
large productivity effect of terracing implies that, even

The objective of this policy note on
land is to assist the Government of Moldova in improving the
effectiveness of land management in agriculture, with a view
to enhancing the sector's contribution to
Moldova's economic growth and poverty reduction
objectives. The note reviews the progress that has been
made to date on land reform in Moldova, and provides
rigorous economic analysis of the impacts of the reforms and

Honduras is Central America’s
second-largest country with a population of more than 8
million and a land area of about 112,000 square kilometers.
The 20th century witnessed a profound economic
transformation and modernization in Honduras. Honduras’
persistent poverty is the result of long-term low per capita
growth and high inequality, perpetuated by the country’s
high vulnerability to shocks. First, over the past 40 years

This study identifies several factors
that inhibit efficiency improvements in the farming sector,
both in themselves and through the dynamics of their mutual
interaction. The study observes that incentives faced in the
labor market have important implications for the land
structure and, and in many ways, are at the heart of the
problem of low labor productivity in agriculture. The study
finds that, while rural households are increasingly

This report centers on the problems
stemming from land issues in Nicaragua. The report's
main recommendations deal with four priority actions:
institutional reform; adjustments to the legal framework;
systematic regularization of land rights; and, firmly
addressing previous land invasions, and preventing future
invasions. The issue of land distribution, and ownership is
especially critical in Nicaragua; indeed, the country

As part of a national experiment, in
2008 Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property
rights reforms, including complete registration of all land
together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate
labor market restrictions. This study uses a discontinuity
design with spatial fixed effects to compare 529 villages
just inside and outside the prefecture’s border. The results
suggest that the reforms increased tenure security, aligned

The housing finance market in Mali
remains small and under developed. Few banks currently offer
a full mortgage product with Banque Malienne de Solidarite,
Mali Housing Bank (BHM), Bank of Africa, and EcoBank being
the main lenders although at minimal levels. The total
annual housing need in Mali based on the household formation
rate amounts to 82,500, split between 51,100 urban units and
31,400 rural units. Overall some social housing is

The world's urban population is
expected to increase by about 2.7 billion by
2050.Virtually all of the increased population
will be in developing countries, leading to massive needs
for new and improved housing and urban infrastructures
(UNDESA 2012). The planning and design of these new
developments will reshape or create new urban landscapes
with significant implications for energy consumption,

Ghana’s urban transformation has been momentous, but it is not unique; a similar
process has characterized other countries at similar levels of development. Ghana’s
key challenge now is to ensure that urbanization continues to complement growth
through improvements in productivity and inclusion, rather than detracting from these
goals. Many rising problems are related to efficiency and inclusion. These include slums, lack of basic services, underdeveloped manufacturing, and insufficient transport
infrastructure.

This Fifth Edition of the Uganda
Economic Update presents evidence that if the urbanization
process is well managed, it has the potential to stimulate
economic growth and to provide productive jobs for a greater
proportion of Uganda s young and rapidly expanding
population. In many countries across the world, the growth
of cities has stimulated the establishment and expansion of
productive businesses by reducing the distance between

This paper uses farm panel data from
China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine
investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently,
China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion
of machine rentals and machine services provided by
specialized agents, which has contributed to mechanization
of agricultural production. The empirical results show that
an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion