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

Over the coming decades, land policy and
administration, for urban as well as rural areas, will be
critical for Ethiopia's development. The vast majority
of people making up the Federal Democratic Republic of
Ethiopia's (FDRE) predominantly agricultural economy
live in rural areas. Finally, land policies and
administration can contribute significantly to the
objectives of promoting gender equality and protecting

South Sudan is a new country of 10.5
million people that has just emerged from conflict and still
facing challenges with recovery and development. Although
economic disparities, political exclusion and deprivation in
the distribution of political and economic power between the
northern and southern parts of then united Sudan were often
tendered as the proximal causes of the conflict, at the
center of the prolonged civil war was the struggle for

The rural economy in Bangladesh has been
a powerful source of economic growth and has substantially
reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable
transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural
Bangladesh are an underexplored, underappreciated, and
largely untold story. The analysis identifies the key
changes occurring in the rural economy, the principal
drivers of rural incomes, the implications for policy, and

Empirical evidence indicates that in
many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal
land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor.
Structural transformation in such developing economies
depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these
most-vulnerable populations located on abundant but marginal
agricultural land. Although the modern sector may be the
source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and

The 2003 land law defines that the Land
Tenure Certificate (LTCs) carries both the wife's and
husband's names. Theoretically, the requirement of both
the wife's and husband's names on the LTCs aims at
enabling the wife to participate more actively in household
economic production for poverty reduction, and to protect
the rights of the woman in the event of civil disputes over
the land that has been provided with a LTCs. A field-based

This issue includes the following
headings: Changes in Poverty and Female-Headed Households in
Africa; Growth and Capital Inflows in Africa; Growth and
Capital Inflows in Africa; Vulnerability to Climate Change
in Coastal Bangladesh; Improving Agricultural Data for
Better Policies; Enhancing Transparency of Large-Scale Land
Acquisition; Explaining the Gender Gap in Agricultural
Productivity; Changing Patterns of Growth and Poverty

This is the second part of land studies
on Northern Uganda designed to inform the Peace, Recovery
and Development Plan (PRDP). This second part of the study,
undertaken during the second half of 2007 in the Lango and
Acholi regions, builds on the first phase conducted in 2006
in the Teso region. This second study has been designed to
present a more quantitative analysis of trends on disputes
and claims on land before displacement, during displacement

This paper is a post-conference summary
of the International Conference on Land Policy Reform that
took place in Jarkarta from July 25-27, 2000. The paper
concerns best practice in land administration systems. While
the paper is focussed on world's best practice, it does
so in the context of developing and emerging industrial
countries such as Indonesia which have diverse land tenure
relationships ranging from areas in cities with active land

This report is a synthesis of information gleaned from four case studies of World Bank-financed land programs in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The case studies were designed to both broaden and deepen our understanding of how land policies affect women and men, with an aim to applying this knowledge in very practical ways to World Ban-supported land projects.

This paper assesses the relation between
access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
(1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
positive association between increased market accessibility
and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but

Agriculture has made major contributions
to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but
the literature has rarely focused on the institutional
factors that might underpin such structural transformation
and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing
on an 8-year panel of 1,200 households in six key provinces,
it explores the impact of government land reallocations and
formal land-use certificates on agricultural productivity