The paper submitted for the partial fulfillment of the Degree of Masters of Science in Contemporary India at University of Oxford.  The study examined divide between the pro-poor approaches to rural industrialisation and transfers of agricultural land.

This study assesses land transactions with explicit reference to their impact on poverty and any land acquisition is likely to displace people in large numbers.

We use nationally representative survey data from two neighboring countries in Southern Africa – Zambia and Malawi – to characterize the current status of rural land rental market participation by smallholder farmers. We find that rural rental market participation is strongly conditioned by land scarcity, and thus is more advanced in Malawi than in lower-density Zambia. In both countries, we find evidence that rental markets contribute to efficiency gains within the smallholder sector by facilitating the transfer of land from less-able to more-able producers.

The potential contribution of land based financing to the development of sustainable and equitable cities and properly serviced communities is often underestimated. Land based financing is a collective name given to a range of instruments by which local governments could expand their revenue base and generate funds that will help them to deliver services and infrastructure development and achieve their maintenance goals.

An estimated 60 per cent of the world’s 17 million refugees currently reside in cities, where they often lack access to financial assistance and legal protection.⁽¹⁾ In their absence, displaced populations depend on participation in formal and, more frequently, informal markets for livelihood generation.

How LIFT promotes formalisation
 

The vision of Ethiopia (GTP-II) is to become a lower middle-income country by 2025

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Ethiopia are offering farmers a new financial product: the SLLC-linked individual loan product

With Second Level Land Certification (SLLC), MFIs have the security of knowing the ownership and exact landholding size of farmers. This has allowed the development of an innovative individual lending product that uses the produce of the land as a form of guarantee.

Cities emerge from the spatial concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial concentration is not enough; the economic viability of cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly across the urban area. This constant movement within dense cities creates wealth but also various degrees of unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and environmental degradation.

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is not straightforward. Among developing countries, changes in income or industrialization correlate only weakly with changes in urbanization. This suggests that policy and institutional factors may also influence the urbanization process.

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 suppliers and customers. The growth of cities has also facilitated provision of social services and infrastructure through economies of scale.

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 migration restrictions. A triple difference approach using the Statistics Bureau’s regular household panel suggests that the reforms increased consumption and income, especially for less wealthy and less educated households, with estimated benefits well above the cost of implementation.

Land policies are of fundamental importance to sustainable growth, good governance, and the well-being of, and the economic opportunities open to, both rural and urban dwellers - particularly the poor. To this end, research on land policy, and analysis of interventions related to the subject, have long been of interest to the Bank's Research Department, and other academic, and civil society institutions.