Increasingly land tenure institutions are required to support the decentralization of services to local governments. One expectation of decentralization is improved delivery of services by the level of government that is closest to the beneficiaries of those services. While the scope of services being allocated to local governments has expanded, many rural local governments lack the revenues needed for them to fulfil their new responsibilities. This guide provides advice to countries that wish to increase revenues by introducing rural property taxes.

In Europe and Central Asia, FAO has 53 member countries today, and provides technical support in 18 countries in the Western Balkans, Trans Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Most of these 18 countries have farm structures dominated by smallholders and family farms or dualistic farm structures with many small farms and few large corporate farms (FAO, 2018).Land fragmentation and small farm sizes are a fundamental structural problem resulting in low productivity and competitiveness in the globalized economy (Di Falco et al.

As the global community looks for ways to move to a greener economy, it is increasingly clear that forests, forestry and forest products must play a central role. This tenth edition of State of the World’s Forests explores the role of forests in human history, finding strong links between forest use and economic and social development and between unabated forest destruction and economic decline. It suggests that forest production has an important role to play in a sustainable future in which consumption and production are connected in a closed cycle.