Submissions Accepted for Presentation at the World Bank Land Conference 2024

..

..

..

...

it is time to evolution in the land registries in order to keep up with the new technological achievements and in order to provide better services to the citizens. There are countries modifying their land registry or implementing new ones. No matter the reason, this process has to take into consideration the value of of information. The accent on quantities is misleading; apparently, a high number of measured and registered plots is an indicator of a successful process. A thorough study may turn out that focus on the quantities and the lack of quality is costly, economically unsustainable and frustrating. How to ensure the best implementation approach?

..

Key messages from "Land policies for resilient and equitable growth in Africa"

Land as an enabler for Agenda 2016: The AU’s Land Governance Strategy

Lessons from Rwanda – and RCMRD’s role in mainstreaming them

aaa

Decentralization, digitization, and recognition of customary tenure: How Bank support helped Malawi make critical reforms

Concluding remarks

The worldwide expansion of human settlements is a major driver of global change and in particular the sprawl of cities poses great challenges. Within just a few years, megacities are sprouting up, urban agglomerations sprawl into hazard zones and entire landscapes are fragmented and irretrievably transformed. But how can the opportunities offered by prospering settlements be put to good use? And how can risk exposure and negative environmental and societal impacts be mitigated? These are key challenges for land governance. And it is here where satellite-based earth observation and machine learning can make important contributions. This article presents the World Settlement Footprint (WSF), digital maps derived from "Big Earth Data", as a valuable tool for information gathering and decision support. The information and knowledge provided by the WSF can help planning, science, policy and business to enable sustainable and informed governance practices and land use strategies.

This paper provides a detailed descriptive analysis of patterns of urbanization across Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rapidity of Sub-Saharan Africa's urbanization, little is known about the anatomy of patterns of urbanization across the region due to a lack of detailed and accurate official data on urban populations. To address this gap, this paper applies the “dartboard” algorithm to high-resolution gridded population data for the region, which is derived from digitized maps of the footprints of all buildings in the region. This allows for a consistent definition of urban areas across countries, overcoming the measurement problems that arise from relying on official definitions of urban areas. Using this definition, the paper presents evidence on key empirical regularities that relate to disparities across the urban hierarchies, as well as on the internal structures of cities. Analysis of how the derived urbanization characteristics relate to country characteristics is also presented.

The lack of comparable urban definitions across countries has presented a significant challenge in effectively addressing poverty in both urban and rural areas. This study aims to tackle this issue by comparing subnational poverty statistics across countries, integrating internationally consistent definitions of urban areas into the World Bank’s official global poverty measurement framework. Focusing primarily on 16 Sub-Saharan African countries, the analysis reveals that poverty rates tend to be lower in densely populated urban areas. However, the findings also highlight that urban areas have a higher concentration of impoverished populations than previously estimated. These results underscore the importance of employing consistent urban definitions in cross-country poverty analysis and call for a reevaluation of geographically targeted policies to expedite poverty reduction efforts.

Understanding economic development, land rights and management, and structural transformation requires accurate and high-resolution measurements of poverty and growth. Fine-grained estimates of living standards are also critical to effectively target policies and evaluate development interventions. However, most low-income countries lack the resources and administrative capacity to regularly collect household-level socioeconomic information. Research in the past few years has developed methods for poverty measurement at the village, neighborhood, and satellite tile level based on machine learning (ML) and satellite imagery. This project advances the literature by producing and evaluating the first national-scale satellite-based poverty estimates at the household level, using two large field surveys in Togo and Bangladesh. We also provide guidance to policymakers and practitioners on which aspects of living standards can be reliably measured from satellite imagery, as well as the cost-benefit tradeoffs in choosing appropriate machine learning techniques for such prediction tasks.

We develop a polygamous household model with child labour improving the value of the future inheritable asset. The model predicts that increasing mothers’ relative bargaining power increases children’s labour supply, especially when cultural norms assign a greater inheritance share to the mother’s child. Using data from Nigeria and the variation in mothers’ bargaining power and inheritance norms, we find that children of the first wife work more than children of other mothers within the polygamous household. This result is more pronounced for boys, landed households and settings where first wives increase their returns to inheritance via their offspring.

Increasing women’s property rights and control over resources is central to the promotion of gender equality in Africa. A recent program in western Uganda offered subsidized formal land titles and encouraged households to include both spouses on the title. This embedded qualitative study investigated participants’ perspectives on the implications of those titles for women’s status. We find that joint titles primarily enhanced women’s sense of land tenure security through an improvement in their feelings of marital security. In this context, even prior to titling, women generally had a good deal of say in the management of marital property. The data demonstrate that by signaling a husband’s commitment to the marriage, joint titling can affect household dynamics not because of women’s greater ability to threaten retreat from the marriage but because, quite the opposite, it instils a sense of security and encourages greater cooperation and investment in the marriage.

The present study estimates how land tenure security, measured through gender-differentiated inheritance patterns, affects maize productivity, the price of agricultural land, soil fertility investments, and annual input use in sub-Saharan Africa. We test the relationship between gender-differentiated inheritance patterns and the outcomes of interest, using nationally representative data from Malawi collected in 2019. Inheritance patterns in the data are either matrilineal where land inheritance and ownership flow through women, or patrilineal where they flow through men. Malawi has a mixture of inheritance patterns across the country. Our results indicate that male plot managers in matrilineal inheritance systems had significantly lower yields than matrilineal female plot managers and both male and female plot managers in patrilineal inheritance systems. Matrilineal male plot managers were significantly less likely to use soil fertility-enhancing practices like soil erosion and water control methods, compared to matrilineal females and patrilineal male plot managers on average.

Recent work shows substantial disagreement between spouses in survey responses about household assets, income, and decision-making. To date, this work has not yet assessed whether this disagreement reflects biased responses, and whether standard survey protocols obtain biased estimates. Many agricultural surveys across the developing world typically interview only one respondent about the characteristics, inputs, and outputs of farm plots, even when multiple household members make decisions about plots. To address this challenge, we individually interview both husbands and wives about all farm plots in 1,243 households in Northern Ghana, and–critically–also collect a third independent observation generated using GPS plot walks and satellite imagery. We find significant disagreement between husbands and wives on even the most basic aspects of household farm plots. We find significant gender-related bias in reports when we match survey data to independent observations of plot size and distance from houses as measured by a GPS receiver.

Building on previous systematic reviews, we explore the findings of the latest impact evaluation evidence on land while adding a new perspective on the evidence to date. Our analysis differs from previous systematic reviews across several dimensions. First, we restrict our literature review to counterfactual-based impact evaluations, including those from recently published evaluation reports. Second, we include evaluations assessing urban and peri-urban interventions in addition to those in rural areas. Third, we use the Global Land Logic Model by which to understand the evidence around the theory of change for land. Fourth, in addition to methodological issues, we interrogate the contextual and programmatic factors that led to the conclusions found within the land impact evaluation studies. We examine not only the outcomes found but the success of implementation and sustainability of outputs. Finally, we look at potential evaluation issues that may have hampered the ability to capture results.

Land tenure programming has been an important component of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s foreign assistance portfolio throughout its 20-year history, with MCC having invested nearly $500m in land projects across 21 countries around the world. Reflecting the agency’s emphasis on accountability and results, MCC funds extensive independent evaluations of nearly all of its projects. To date, 14 independent evaluations of MCC land projects have been completed, spanning a range of evaluation methods, project types, and geographies. This paper will synthesize the findings from MCC’s evaluations along with the experiences of operational staff to identify key lessons learned for funders, implementers, and evaluators in the land sector. These will include programmatic lessons to inform the design and implementation of future land projects, as well as recommendations for future evaluations of land programs.

This focuses on the causal relationship between land tenure security and agricultural productivity in the Andean context of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Leveraging comprehensive cross-sectional data, our research employs a bias-corrected stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency. The findings unveil a notable 9 to 12% increase in agricultural technical efficiency associated with formal land tenure security. However, these effects exhibit variations across the studied countries.

To address concerns related to endogeneity, we employ Propensity Score Matching alongside a Tobit model. The insights gained from this research contribute significantly to understanding the dynamics of the agricultural landscape, providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers. Future iterations of this study will further explore factors contributing to the observed variations and delve into potential heterogeneous effects based on gender and ethnicity. This research serves as a foundation for informed policies aimed at fostering sustainable rural development in the diverse and economically significant Andean region.

Titling and formalization efforts in developing countries are expected to strengthen tenure security. Current scholarship suggests cautious support for a potential incentivizing role of stronger tenure security in promoting investments and economic growth. However, there are large and important gaps in the empirical literature. Given mixed results, a small number of experimental designs, and the limited geographic scope of rigorous impact evaluations, there is a clear need for additional systematic empirical work. This study uses household panel data, land administration data, and qualitative data to investigate the impact of a land formalization intervention in Mozambique. The research applies a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design with matching to explore mechanisms, outcomes and sustainability. We focus on differential treatment effects across a range of subgroups.

In Madagascar, there is a dearth of studies on how migrants access land through land markets (purchases and tenancy contracts). This paper relies on qualitative and quantitative data carried out in 2018 to explore the functioning of land markets in a rural region in Western Madagascar. The focus on domestic in-migrants is a gateway to explore the effects of markets in terms of inclusion and equity. The econometric models show that migrants are not facing exclusion for accessing land through land markets, beyond a financial constraint that is also affecting natives, and that is mostly binding for purchases, not for tenancy contracts. Migrants who manage to overcome the barriers and to purchase land end up practically with the same average amount of land in property that the natives. For the natives, the local land purchase market also contributes to reduce land inequalities that are due to initial inheritance differences.

Due to rapid urbanization and economic development in China, cities have experienced a massive influx of migrants from other parts of China since the late 20th century, leading to the emergence of urban villages characterized by informal settlement of diverse populations, substandard living conditions, inadequate infrastructure and essential services. Urban villages have become focal points for regeneration efforts aimed at achieving sustainable urban growth and improving living conditions. However, urban village regeneration increasingly generates concerns about gentrification effects, displacement, and even conflicts between various stakeholders. Original residents, especially migrants are usually excluded in the decision making, while their behavior towards relocation policy is very likely to hinder the process of urban village regeneration. This paper investigates migrants’ preferences for the alternative relocation policy designs through the stated choice experiment approach, aimed at providing insights for urban planners and policy makers to make more inclusive regeneration policies.

We examine misallocation by investigating how measurement errors in output and inputs affect the estimation of agricultural productivity loss associated with resource misallocation. We find that measurement errors account for a substantial part of the estimated total factor productivity (TFP) variations (30-45% at the national level). Failing to account for measurement errors would considerably overestimate the gains from resource reallocation. Based on the preferred Two-Stage least squares (2SLS) estimation of the production function, measurement errors in both output and inputs will lead to an overstatement of production gains by 2-3-fold if not adjusted in productivity estimation. The results are consistent regardless of whether the analysis is explored by analyzing household productivity variation across years or across households within local communes. The findings caution against relying on estimates unadjusted for measurement error of potential gains from reallocation in cost-benefit analysis of reallocation. Certain caveats and assumptions of the analysis are discussed.

In this paper, I develop a model to study the equilibrium effects of price control policies. My framework considers the option for consumers to wait and re-enter the market if items are not immediately allocated due to excess demand. While waiting is commonly associated with the price ceiling, it has received limited attention in prior research. I study the housing market in Shanghai, where a price ceiling has been imposed on new houses since 2017. Using a structural model, I estimate household demand, supply, and waiting costs. The welfare loss associated with the price ceiling is 13 billion USD from 2018 to 2020. Consumer surplus increased by 1.3 billion USD, as most of the gains from lower prices of new houses were offset by waiting and misallocation. Counterfactual analyses suggest that distributing a voucher to buyers instead could significantly reduce welfare loss and achieve more equitable outcomes.

We develop a framework to estimate the economic value of zoning reform in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we show that developers respond to reform with short-run increases in filings for multi-family construction permits in blocks with higher allowable densities. In the medium-run we observe increases in housing availability and reductions in house prices in neighborhoods that were allowed more densification. We estimate welfare with an equilibrium model of housing demand and supply that allows for housing regulation. We find that, in the long-run, the reform produces a 1.9% increase in housing stock and a 0.5% reduction in prices, with substantial heterogeneity across neighborhoods. Consumer welfare gains due to price reductions are small, but increase 4-fold once accounting for changes in built environment, with more gains accruing to college educated and higher income families.

We study how various zoning regulations combine to affect housing supply, rents, and prices, and which regulations policy makers should relax if they want to reduce housing prices. Exploiting cross-sectional variation across space in novel parcel-level zoning data from Greater Boston and a boundary discontinuity design at regulation boundaries, we causally estimate the effect of various zoning regulations on housing supply, prices, and rents of single- and multifamily homes. We find that relaxing density restrictions, alone or combined with relaxing other regulations, is most effective at increasing housing supply, particularly of multifamily properties, and reducing per-housing-unit rents and prices. Our results also suggest that zoning regulations affect per-housing-unit prices by changing housing characteristics and, in effect, increasing the size of the smallest housing unit available. Counterfactual simulations imply that the recent Massachusetts policy to increase building density near transit stations can reduce rents and sale prices, particularly in suburban municipalities.

When natural disasters strike, the impact on housing markets can be far-reaching. This paper explores the unique dynamics of natural disaster-induced migration on the housing market, focusing on Los Angeles—the top destination of the 1930s Dust Bowl (DB) migrants. We employ U.S. Census-linked and geocoded address data to show that the arrival of “Dust Bowlers” significantly impacted the city’s housing market. We find that houses inhabited by Dust Bowl migrants had lower growth rates in prices and rents over the decade. We also find that houses inhabited by non-migrants had higher depreciation of their values the closer they were to Dust Bowl migrants. We also find that neighborhoods that received more Dust Bowl migrants had lower growth rates of house values and rents over the decade. Our research contributes to a better understanding of how natural disaster-induced migration shapes housing markets.

This study examines urban forests as a policy tool for air pollution mitigation. We study an afforestation program in the city of Beijing, which planted a total of 2 million mu of greenery – roughly the size of Los Angeles – across the city over a decade. We conduct a remote-sensing audit of the program, finding that it contributes to a substantial greening up of the city. This causes significant downwind air quality improvement, reducing average PM2.5 concentration at city population hubs by 4.2 percent. Rapid vegetation growth, however, led to a 7.4 percent increase in pollen exposure. Analysis of medical claims data shows aeroallergens triggered emergency room visits. We offer insight on managing urban forests’ health risks, identifying harmful pollen species and susceptible population subgroups.

We argue that while community forest management is effective in protecting forest resources, as argued by Ostrom, such management may fail to provide the proper incentives to nurture such resources because the benefits of forest management are collectively shared. This study proposes a mixed private and community management system characterized by communal protection of community-owned forest areas and individual management of individually owned trees as a desirable arrangement for timber forest management in developing countries. By conducting a randomized experiment in Ethiopia, we found that the mixed management system significantly stimulated intensive forest management activities, including pruning, guarding, and watering. Furthermore, more timber trees and forest products were extracted from the treated areas, which are byproducts of tree management (e.g., thinned trees and pruned branches). In contrast, the extracted volumes of non-timber forest products unrelated to tree management (fodder and honey) did not change with the intervention.

Forest conservation and restoration continue to be undervalued, underpriced, and underfunded. Financing for forests mostly focuses on climate change mitigation, valuing forests for their carbon storage capacity. With increasing attention on the importance of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and preservation of indigenous and local cultures, it has become clear that there are visible and invisible co-benefits of forests that are equally – if not more – significant than carbon alone. We review evidence supporting an expanded valuation of forests, and assess practical examples to overcome this valuation gap. We do this by first offering an economic framework for our analysis, defining a social cost of deforestation (SCD). We then use this lens to assess a suite of opportunities to appropriately value and monetize forest co-benefits. These identified tools may help avoid suboptimal outcomes arising from a carbon-centric approach – supporting policy discussions, and unlocking expanded public and private finance for forests.

We develop a novel spatiotemporal algorithm to explore deforestation scenarios in the Brazilian Amazon and their relationship with public policies. We predict total deforestation using exogenous macroeconomic factors and allocate it across space using local economic and environmental conditions. When accounting for forecasted macroeconomic conditions, expected deforestation until 2025 is 35% lower than when current deforestation rates continued unchanged, indicating macroeconomic conditions favorable for reduced deforestation. Expected deforestation is concentrated in central Pará and southern Amazonas, especially along the main roads. We then develop a policy scenario with stronger conservation efforts, where non-designated public forests are treated like protected areas. Here, deforestation leakage mainly occurs in rural settlements and properties. The spatially explicit model can help identify risk areas for targeted policy responses and shed light on where leakage can be expected when local protection mechanisms are enforced. Accompanying the paper is an online dashboard to visualize the results interactively.

Previous research assumes that households pursue formal land titles when titles are available. Land titles are hypothesized to increase tenure security, but where households distrust state institutions, they may doubt that land titles will reduce expropriation. I use a field conjoint experiment of 1,164 household heads across rural Senegal to understand which attributes affect the perceived likelihood of winning a land dispute. Land titles increase the likelihood of winning a perceived land dispute for all respondents, but the effect is weaker for those who distrust formal institutions. Social proximity to customary elites does not affect these results. A structural topic model shows that where formal titles are not a deciding factor, respondents discuss improvements made to the land. This paper shows the role of politics in conditioning households demand for formal property rights and advances a growing literature on the political economy of informality.

The state's reach has been shown to impact civil conflict, democracy, and the power of local authorities. In this paper, we demonstrate that it also affects the social institutions that govern gender and property rights. We draw on an original household-level survey in Malawi to show that state reach is associated with variations in women’s property rights at the community and household level, while taking into account land values, migration patterns, market access, ethnic heterogeneity, education, household income, and, critically, matriliny/patriliny. These results are complemented by evidence from 32 gender-segregated focus groups with smallholder farmers. This research addresses broader questions of heterogeneity and change within the social institutions that structure individual behavior, as well as the role state reach plays in securing property rights for women in Africa.

At the begininng there were Torrens Laws in ninteen States but today they are only in force in four. The paper points out the reason for the failure is not only due to the vested interests but it also goes further about the mistakes in the basic design.

The first claims against the Torrens were based on its constitutionality because it was said not to respect the due proces of law. This resulted in several sentences and academic studies that showed a high level of understanding of a Registration system.

The mistaken design which lead to a failureof th system was due to: 1) the expense and cmplexityof the procedures; 2) the mistakes made in the procedure to examine the titles and the organization of human capital; 3 The regulation of the insurance fund; and 4) the possibility to withdraw the property title.

Conclusion the consecuences and costs bad elections

Despite the wealth of evidence demonstrating the importance of land documentation, providing land documents at scale in developing countries is often unsustainable for service providers, including country governments and donors. As a result, providers are increasingly evaluating and adopting financial models that help defray the costs of mapping and registering land at scale. These models – sometimes called cost-recovery models or beneficiary contribution models – typically ask the recipient of a land document to contribute some or all of the cost of registering their land.

This study examines a USAID-funded customary land formalization program that relied on a beneficiary contribution model to deliver tens of thousands of customary land certificates in rural Tanzania. Utilizing a mixed methods approach that draws on land registration data, a household survey and qualitative data collection, the study aims to provide insights into who is willing and able to pay for land documents, and why.

Cluster farming is increasingly promoted in Ethiopia as one of the agglomeration models spurring rural development. We examine the role of land as a constraint to the development of cluster-based development in Ethiopia. We further disaggregate farm households based on their landholding to better understand potential heterogeneities. We also document other household socio-economic and network characteristics that may matter in cluster farming. Our findings show a positive association between landholding and cluster farming both at the extensive and intensive margins. We also find suggestive evidence that participation rates are lower for small-scale farms, but also declines for large-scale farms. In addition, we show that access to information and network matter in enabling cluster farming. Our findings are relevant in the framework of plans to upscale the cluster-based development initiative in Ethiopia. Attention to landholding issues is key area where policy action can be geared to boost cluster farming.

The rapid expansion of mechanization services has significantly influenced agricultural production, particularly in developing countries with small farms. This paper investigates how these services affect productivity across different production stages. Utilizing data from 145 wheat farms in Northern China (2013-2020), we analyze inputs and outputs at each stage. Results indicate that while mechanization services generally benefit productivity, they adversely affect the plant protection stage. This stage's inefficiency hampers overall farm productivity, suggesting that carefully selecting mechanization services and providers for each production stage could be crucial for small farms seeking to maximize productivity.

The study employs a farm household-level panel dataset from Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania to investigate the relationship between property rights and agricultural socio-economic development. The findings reveal a no-relationship between operated land size, capital, and farm Total Factor Productivity (TFP), indicating significant frictions in land and capital markets. These frictions, associated with land institutions favoring less productive farmers, lead to resource misallocation. However, the study demonstrates that securing land rights through certificates facilitates the reallocation of factor inputs to more efficient farms, resulting in positive aggregate effects. Land certificates also promote rentals, reduce misallocation, and enhance agricultural productivity. Furthermore, the research highlights that obtaining a land certificate influences households' decisions to remain in agriculture, indicating a potential link between secure property rights and migration patterns. The overall implication is that implementing a secure property rights system could significantly improve productivity and resource allocation efficiency in agriculture.

We analyze the impact of a 2021 reform in Ukraine that—after earlier digitization efforts did not produce desired results—mandated use of transparent online auctions by local governments rather than a central agency to lease rights to public agricultural land. The shift to a collusion-proof electronic auction system increased lease revenue by 175% for our preferred specification. Had all public land that Ukraine transferred since 2015 been auctioned using postreform mechanisms, local governments would have received incremental lease revenue of US$500 million per year. Where public land is important, reforms to ensure rights to such land are allocated transparently, competitively and in a decentralized way could improve social, economic, and environmental outcomes.

We document a nationwide “assessment gap” which leads local governments to place a disproportionate fiscal burden on racial and ethnic minorities. We show that holding taxing jurisdictions and property tax rates fixed, Black and Hispanic residents face a 10–13 percent higher tax burden for the same bundle of public services. We decompose this inequality into between- and within-neighborhood components and find just over half of the inequality arises between neighborhoods. We then present evidence on mechanisms. Property assessments are less sensitive to neighborhood attributes than market prices are. This generates spatial variation in tax burden within jurisdiction and leads to over-taxation of highly minority communities. We also find appeals behavior and appeals outcomes differ by race. Inequality does not arise from either (i) racial differences in transaction prices or (ii) differences in features of the housing stock.

Using sales and leasing data, this paper finds three novel effects of a higher property transaction tax: higher buy-to-rent transactions alongside lower buy-to-own transactions, despite both being taxed; lower sales-to-leases and price-to-rent ratios; and longer time-on-the-market. This paper explains these facts by developing a search model with entry of investors and households choosing to own or rent in the presence of credit frictions. A higher transaction tax reduces homeowners’ mobility and increases demand for rental properties, which reduces the homeownership rate. The deadweight loss is large at 113% of tax revenue, with more than half of this due to distorting decisions to own or rent.

Whereas the tax compliance literature emphasizes verifying tax liability amounts, this paper highlights two other tax capacity dimensions of particular relevance in lower-income countries: identifying taxable entities and enforcing collection of known liabilities. Leveraging a newly-digitized property database, a randomized experiment in Liberia finds that including identifying information (owners' names and property photographs) in tax notices more than quadruples the payment rate, from 2 percent to almost 10 percent, when the notice also details noncompliance penalties. A second experiment finds that signaling greater collection probability to delinquent taxpayers further increases compliance. These results highlight the importance of targeted investments in tax capacity.

This paper evaluates a program that partially decentralized the administration of rural land taxes to local authorities in exchange of increases in their share of tax revenues. Using microdata from tax returns, we find that the program led to an expansion of tax revenues by 20\% after five years. Decentralization expanded tax revenues mainly by increasing reported land values. Using satellite data, we find that partial decentralization did not influence farmer behavior significantly. A cost-benefit exercise indicates that partial decentralization had large returns. Overall, the findings indicate that cooperation between local and central authorities can increase property taxation in contexts with incomplete information and weak enforcement capacity.

We implemented a randomized evaluation of the impacts of KhetScore, an innovative credit scoring methodology that uses digital technologies to unlock credit and insurance for smallholders including landless farmers. In our treatment group, where we offered loans and insurance based on the KhetScore methodology, farmers were more likely to purchase insurance, renew insurance coverage in subsequent years, and borrow from formal sources. Despite increased borrowing, households in the treatment group faced less difficulty in repaying loans, suggesting that KhetScore loans, bundled with crop insurance, transferred risk and eased the burden of repayment. constraints. Finally, women in the treatment group reported significantly higher levels of empowerment and mental health, manifested in increased participation in household decision-making and reduced feelings of stress, than women in the control group. In conclusion, digital technologies can contribute substantially to expansion in agricultural credit access, risk management, resilience, and well-being among marginalized landless farmers.

Family farming is an important source of income for rural populations in Senegal. But, because of the effects of agricultural shocks coupled with the vagaries of climate change, farmers are often unable to increase their production, let alone their income. The objective of this research is to analyze the resilience strategies of family farms in rural Senegal in response to agricultural shocks, and to assess the effect of these resilience strategies on the productivity of farms and the income of farmers. The multivariate analysis shows that the adoption of resilience strategies of family farms is strongly linked to climatic variables (humidity, temperature, precipitation), the level of education of the owner of the farm, the size of the agricultural household and the agroecological zone. The impact evaluation shows that these resilience strategies have a significantly positive impact on the productivity of family farms in rural areas.

Quantifying the economic impacts of extreme climate scenarios on agriculture at a country level is important, informing the formulation of tailored adaptation policies and sustainable livelihoods. This study examined the current and potential economic impacts of climate change on Malawi’s agriculture using Ricardian analysis based on a four-year World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) panel data from 1,246 farming households. The marginal impact analysis was conducted for temperature and rainfall. The study then predicted the impact of climate scenarios on net revenue up to the year 2099. The results revealed that more warming will negatively affect agriculture land returns on one hand, while more precipitation will generate gains on the other hand. An ensemble of Global Circulation Models’ simulation affirms that impacts from global warming will be more important than those from precipitation change.

This paper investigates the effects of access to farmland on nutritional outcomes by examining gender differences in a developing country context. It specifically highlights the role of access to farmland in the promotion of dietary diversity and nutritional status of children under five and women. Based on a representative sample at the national level, analyses showed that access to farmland increases children’s dietary diversity score by 0.18 and 0.24 in full sample and male-headed households’ subsample, respectively. In addition, access to farmland increases the children nutritional status by 0.18 height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) in the male-headed households. Moreover, access to farmland increases by 3% and 4% the probability of having a normal Body Mass Index for women in the full sample and subsample of male headed households. This study calls for a more expensive Government land policy in order to improve economic growth, resilience, and poverty reduction in developing countries.

This paper evaluates the impact of a rural land administration program in Ecuador on female empowerment and household food security. Using a double robust estimation that combines the difference-in-difference approach with inverse probability weighting, we explore whether receiving a georeferenced cadastral map of one’s parcel provides women with increased bargaining power, empowering them to participate more actively in productive and consumption decision-making that leads to improved diversification of the production portfolio and the household’s food security. Although we find no significant effects on aggregate levels of empowerment, results show that female beneficiaries became more empowered with regards to access to and generation of resources and time use. Households who received jointly titled cadastral maps also increased their food security and crop diversification. These results suggest that increasing informal tenure security through cadastral mapping may spur female empowerment, thus improving their own and the family’s overall welfare.

This paper examines the role of the customary tenure system in redistributing land resources within the context of developing countries, facing challenges such as market imperfections and land idleness. Specifically, it scrutinizes the scenario in Malawi, where the farmland market is underdeveloped, and land acquisition predominantly occurs through customary tenure systems. Leveraging data from the National Integrated Household Panel Survey, the study employs a combination of fixed effects and maximum likelihood statistical techniques. Research findings show that farmland allocated by chiefs or employers is associated with higher farming ability scores, signaling allocative efficiency; however, the welfare effect is not significant, though positive. While the inherited customary land tenure system proves inefficient in allocating land with a significant negative farming ability score, it demonstrates a positive impact on crop sales income.

In Madagascar, the land used for extensive cattle rearing is currently the subject of increased competition between different users. A bill is on the political agenda to deal with the situation of these lands. However, no concrete path has been drawn to legally recognize the land rights of agropastoralists. This article analyses the methods of land governance and the strategies used by local people to secure land tenure, and suggests ways of meeting the challenges of the legal recognition of local land rights. Our qualitative interviews showed that the pasturelands studied are similar to unconventional Ostromian commons, under the authority of 'big agropastoralists'. Faced with the sources of insecurity, agropastoralists also resort either to negotiation or to ignoring bans or using fire. The challenge is therefore to design flexible, accessible tools that are adapted to the realities of local players, in order to provide legal recognition of their rights

Mailo is a type of customary land tenure that was created and semi-formalized during the colonial period, creating landlords and tenants. Mailo lands, which are mostly found in central Uganda close to Kampala, are prone to tenure insecurity and high levels of dispute further exacerbated by rising land values. The World Bank is implementing an impact evaluation of land governance interventions on Mailo land by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) “Improvement of Land Governance in Uganda (ILGU)” pilot project. This paper presents findings on the impact of the ILGU program on land documentation, bussulu payment, knowledge and awareness, land rights, perceived tenure security, conflict, land-related investment, land markets, livelihoods and productivity, intra-household bargaining, climate change and shocks/coping strategies. The IE design is based on a geographic discontinuity approach on sub- county borders.

The research investigates the intricate nexus between armed conflict, land markets, and the transformative impacts of peace agreements, centering on the Colombian scenario following the 2016 accord with FARC. A specific focus is on Caquetá, a region historically marred by conflict, where the study delves into the implications of the peace agreement on land transactions. Utilizing economic transaction data from Certificates of Tradition and Freedom (CTF) and conflict information from the Colombian Observatory of Memory and Conflict (CNMH), the analysis categorizes Civil Society Natural Reserves (RNSCs) based on conflict intensity. Applying a Differences in Differences (DiD) methodology, the study discerns a 3.6 percentage point decrease in economic transactions post-2016, reflecting heightened security and a pronounced shift towards sustainable land practices. This reduction in market transactions underscores the tangible and transformative impact of post-conflict stability, allowing rural communities to prioritize land development, conservation, and economic strategies for long-term sustainability and prosperity.

This study explores the links between conflict, land and indigenous peoples in several regions of Mindano, the Philippines, notorious for their levels of poverty and conflict. The analysis takes advantage of the unprecedented concurrence of data from the most recent, 2020, census; an independent conflict data monitor for Mindanao; and administrative sources on ancestral land titling for indigenous peoples in the Philippines. While evidence elsewhere compellingly links land titling with conflict reduction, we find a more nuanced story. Conflicts, including land- and resource-related conflicts, are generally less likely in districts (barangays) with higher shares of indigenous peoples. Ancestral domain areas also have a lower likelihood for general conflict but a higher likelihood for land-related conflict. Ancestral domains titling does not automatically solve land-related conflicts. When administrative delays take place (from cumbersome bureaucratic processes, insufficient resources and weak institutional capacity), titling processes may lead to sustained, rather than decreased, conflict.

The role of eradication policies in decreasing drug trade, insecurity, and ultimately fostering development remains largely debated. This paper examines the unintended consequences of aerial fumigation of coca on human capital accumulation and its medium-term socioeconomic impact in Colombia. Employing a spatial regression discontinuity design and utilizing newly digitized data on the exact areas subjected to aerial spraying, we find that eradication increases dropout and failure rates in the short term. A key mechanism is the negative income shock experienced by households. Furthermore, we document that even after the ban on aerial spraying in 2015, villages exposed to eradication exhibit worse socioeconomic outcomes, including lower schooling, higher child labor, increased early marriage, and deteriorating living conditions.

Greenfield urban planning is a key policy to help meet housing demand in rapidly growing African cities. This paper studies the consequences of the planned layout (size and configuration of residential and non-residential plots) of Tanzania's "20,000 plot" project, which provided over 36,000 residential plots on the fringes of Dar es Salaam in the early 2000s. We apply within-neighborhood analysis and spatial regression discontinuity designs to new data from questionnaires and satellite imagery. We find that small plots, which command higher land values and are built more intensively, are under-provided; smaller plots owners value homogeneity in plot size; grid structured layouts of blocks are valued as is access to major paved roads; and public service provision lags the plans. About half the plots are still unbuilt; yet the areas nevertheless attract highly educated owners. Findings suggest improvements to planning are possible despite large overall gains in land value.

We examine the effect of a large-scale administrative reorganization in China, where counties are annexed into cities to accommodate urban growth. We present a simple model to illustrate how this annexation may affect firm entry decisions and in turn land market outcomes. Using nationwide data on land-lease transactions, we find that annexation raises industrial land prices in the annexed counties by 7 percent but does not reduce land prices in neighboring counties and central cities. We show that the annexed counties experienced increases in firm entry and investment, offering a plausible mechanism for the effect on industrial land prices.

Does urban density facilitate the diffusion of information? This paper exploits plausibly exogenous variation generated by a unique national policy in China that requires all residential buildings to receive sufficient hours of sunshine. The policy creates higher degrees of restriction on density at higher latitudes, where longer shadows require buildings to be further apart. Data on individual housing projects across China reveal that the cross-latitude variation can be described quite well by a formula linking structure density to latitude through the solar elevation angle. Using differential topic dynamics on a national petition platform to measure information diffusion, this paper shows that people respond to shifts in government attention with varying speeds across latitudes. These responses are systematically faster in southern cities, where density is higher. Survey evidence further indicates that otherwise similar individuals are more likely to gossip about public issues in a southern city.

We advance a novel hypothesis that China’s recent anti-corruption campaign may have contributed to the resurgence of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China as an unintended consequence. We present supporting evidence from the Chinese real estate sector, which is notorious for pervasive rentseeking and corruption. We use a unique data set of land parcel transactions merged with firm-level registration information and a difference-in-differences empirical design to show that, relative to the industrial land parcels which serve as the control, the fraction of residential land parcels purchased by SOEs increased significantly relative to that purchased by private developers after the anticorruption campaign. We interpret the findings through both theoretical model and empirical analysis where we show, since selling land to private developers carries the stereotype that the city official may have received bribes, even the “clean” local officials will become more willing to award land to SOEs.

Using the universe of land records from a large state in India, we document three empirical facts on rural land holding inequality at the village-level: 1) inequality is higher close to urban areas and decreases with distance, 2) this is due to fewer medium-sized farms (i.e. more small and large farms near urban areas), and 3) the distance to urban area-land holding inequality relationship depends on the size of the urban area - larger the urban area, greater the inequality close to such towns. A parsimonious model where individual farmers face a U-shaped agriculture production function between land size and farm productivity, bequest considerations of their land among their children, and a significant urban opportunity cost of farm production, explains these patterns.

Financial development has proved to promote China's rural transformation. This paper uses the staggered difference-in-difference approach to investigate the impact of the Postal Saving Bank of China reforms in rural areas on agricultural labor productivity (ALP) across 1474 counties in China for the 1993-2016 period. We addressed the potential econometric issues, such as the sample selection bias, the negative weight problem and the potential reverse causality. The results show that increasing the banking penetration by establishing new branches in rural China did not significantly improve the county-level ALP, while financial institutions engaging in credit services could. On average, financial institutions engaging in lending activities contributes to a 1.69% increase in ALP through 0.63% increase of capital deepening and 1% increase of ALP. Finally, we also find that financial development is likely to increase the efficiency of physical capital investment but to decrease the efficiency of land use.

Do rural-urban highways increase land inequality in villages? Theory suggests that, with

credit market imperfections, lower trade costs can increase land inequality through increasing returns technology adoption. Using data on household land ownership in rural India, we provide the first evidence on this issue. Identification exploits the distance of a district to the Golden Quadrilateral network (inconsequential place) and the length of colonial railroad in the 1880s in a district. A 10 percent increase in market access of a district increases land Gini by 2.5 percent, share of landless households by 6.8 percent, and adoption of increasing-returns farming technology by 3.5 percent.

A number of recent papers have found impressive, positive effects of the global Green Revolution on agricultural productivity and measures of economic growth. Yet Indian economists writing in the 1970s and 1980s worried that the Green Revolution may have increased rural inequality. Working with nationally representative datasets that span the Green Revolution in India, we find that the roll-out of high-yielding crop varieties (mostly rice and wheat) seems to have increased land inequality in India, as well as inequality in rural income and rural, female educational attainment. We are also exploring the mechanisms behind these distributional impacts.

The global forest sector is expected to play a major role in achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets. Therefore, there is an urgent need to explore practical and promising solutions to the challenges facing carbon accounting and policy assessment as the global community undertakes forest sector actions—including the REDD+ initiative. This book demonstrates how vital it is that we identify appropriate perspectives and formulate approaches to address these challenges in an integrated and effective manner. In doing so, it addresses many of the major issues, including the differential potentials for carbon sequestration within various forest ecosystems as well as for storage within a variety of harvested wood products, the joint production of timber and carbon, and the measurement and impact of forest carbon offsets and credits, results-based payments, and other nationally determined contributions centered differences. The book also examines regional and national case studies from across the world.

In this paper, we examine the institutional and financial innovations to achieve a meaningful recognition of the value tropical nations and their forests can provide for global mitigation efforts. On the institutional front, tackling deforestation will require an economic transition promoting productivity beyond commodities, as well as forest conservation and sustainable rural livelihoods in a frame of jurisdictional REDD+ programs. On the financial front, we show how a combination of forest carbon bonds, where countries can sell forward their emission reduction outcomes, as well as call and put options can be used to de-risk and encourage early investment in jurisdictional REDD+. Our estimates suggest the SAFE could obtain up to US$9-18 billion in trading call options on future emission reduction vintages (2024-2030) and raise up to US$45 billion for upfront investment by trading low-risk forest carbon bonds. The instruments and methods we propose can be used by other tropical nations.

This article underscores the role of land in mitigating climate change and stresses the connection between reducing emissions and safeguarding the rights of communities. While industrialised countries acknowledge their responsibility to increase emissions reductions, the effects of mitigation and adaptation on land use affect millions of people. Delivering on all governments’ commitments to land-carbon dioxide removal would encompass 1.2 billion hectares of land, triggering significant transformations of land use, including afforestation initiatives, which though crucial for carbon offsetting are criticized for displacing communities. The success of climate action depends on effective governance more than on any other factor. This article argues that while climate action may affect land rights, good governance can facilitate just and equitable transitions and socio-economic opportunities. Case studies illustrate the delicate balance that must be struck between environmental protection and governance, emphasizing the need for holistic strategies that safeguard both ecosystems and the rights of communities.

In this paper, we explore the governance structures of carbon farming projects and assess how existing structures reduce transaction costs to facilitate the engagement of smallholder farmers. Building on qualitative data from eleven carbon farming projects in Kenya, we developed a generalized project-level governance structure. Our analysis of project-level governance structures revealed the need for multi-stakeholder partnerships, the importance of local implementation partners with strong connections to potential project participants and the need to develop multi-layer farmer-based structures for effective project implementation. The operational and geographic overlap of existing carbon farming projects, paired with recent growth in new projects entering the market, calls for the development of cross-project governance structures. Our findings provide important insights on the operationalization of smallholder carbon farming projects, relevant for project developers and policymakers in Kenya and beyond.

This paper presents long-term results from a randomized control trial (RCT) with married couples in rural Uganda testing the impacts of two interventions – alone and together – aimed at empowering women. The first intervention offered couples assistance with obtaining a freehold land title at no cost, with incentives in place for the inclusion of the wife’s name on the title (as (co-)owner of the land). The goal of this intervention was to strengthen women’s property rights. The second intervention offered women an unconditional cash grant. The goal was to relax women's credit constraints. Results show that both interventions significantly increased long-term agricultural investment, the value of harvest produced and traded in the market by the households, and increased women's decision-making power vis-a-vis their husbands.

This paper evaluates different policy instruments to increase demand for co-titling in the context of a land titling intervention offering freehold land titles to married couples in rural Uganda. We cross-randomized whether (a) the household is exposed to an information treatment making salient the benefits of adding the wife’s name to the title; (b) the land title offer is made conditional on the wife’s name being added to the title; and (c) the intervention is targeted to husbands alone versus husbands and wives together. We find that only half of the husbands choose to add their wives’ name on the title, but the information treatment persuades most of them to do so. In contrast, most couples add the wives’ names on the titles irrespective of the information treatment. Making the offer conditional on the wife’s name being on the title does not reduce overall demand for titling.

In this paper, we document patterns of land tenure insecurity in a matrilineal region of Mozambique. We explore the gendered sources and covariates of tenure insecurity that stems either from private land disputes or collective expropriation (by government or large-scale land investors). We find that overall, nearly half of respondents report experiencing collective insecurity, as compared with only 12.5% reporting individual insecurity. We distinguish patterns between principal males, female spouses, and principal females, finding principal males feel the least secure about their collective and individual rights. Secondly, we use the fact that in several of the villages surveyed, the government carried out a variety of land rights documentation interventions, including a community delimitation, individual parcel demarcation, and full certification of rights. This continuum of documentation efforts allows us to see how different interventions match existing forms of tenure insecurity, and what is needed to address fears about losing land.

This study seeks to investigate if adoption of digital land market services has led to successful digital inclusion and helped narrow gender gap in rural household welfare using cross-sectional gender disaggregated data from 612 rural households in Nigeria. The study used different matching techniques and endogenous switching regression (ESR) model which controls for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Findings show that, there is significant difference between the male and female rural households in terms of their welfare status despite the adoption, with male households are better off compared to their female counterparts. Using ESR model, findings show that the impact of adoption of digital land marketing services are effective at enhancing male and female households’ welfare outcome. Policies that are aimed at scaling up digital land marketing services adoption among households would help bridge gender gap in welfare status, which may impact their food consumption expenditure positively.

We conduct a framed field experiment, designed after real tenure structures in Uganda, to elucidate the impact of land tenure security on deforestation. From a sample frame of households with access to forests, we randomly select 1,632 participants, across six districts and 91 villages in Uganda, to make harvest and conservation decisions over an experimental forest. One-third of participants faced insecure tenure through the threat of eviction, one-third had the option to secure tenure through costly certification, and one-third faced secure tenure. The results show that insecure tenure increases tree extraction by 23%, while certification reduces that effect by half. The conservation effects of certification are intensified for participants with a lived experience of land tenure insecurity. Our findings demonstrate that land certification can improve environmental outcomes and that these effects may be amplified in regions with historical legacies of insecurity.

Individual property rights can improve economic efficiency but may expose marginalized groups to dispossession. We use a geographic regression discontinuity design to quantify the long-term impacts of individual rights on the socioeconomic conditions of the Mapuche, Chile's largest indigenous group. The transition from communally-held titles to individual rights reduced Mapuche control over land, while improving land use efficiency and labor allocation. Although socioeconomic conditions within former reservations improved, exposure to dispossession prevented the Mapuche from sharing in the economic benefits of individual property rights.

Collective recognition of indigenous claims to land and traditional authority has advanced rapidly in recent decades in many countries. How do these processes impact identity and views of democracy among individuals within communities themselves? I examine this in Peru, where the government has recognized thousands of indigenous communities covering one-third of the national territory. I leverage spatial and temporal variation in community recognition paired with detailed household survey data and find, using age cohort analysis, that the effects vary by generation in ways shaped by land access and scarcity. Experiencing recognition increases community self-identification, community membership, and positive views of democracy. But the effects are strongest among adults and near-adults at the time of recognition, who are best positioned to win greater access to scarce community land and invest in community life immediately post-recognition. Peru’s communities, like in many postcolonial states, struggle with multigenerational reconstitution following legacies of land dispossession.

This study rigorously examines the impact of state decentralization on land use in Indonesia, focusing on the creation of new administrative units over the past two decades. Despite the anticipated improvement in local governance, the nuanced effects on land use and forest dynamics remain ambiguous. Employing a spatial boundary discontinuity design with 14,000 Indonesian villages and analyzing 115 district splits, we uncover a significant 35% decline in deforestation within newly formed districts compared to their pre-existing counterparts, both pre and post-split. Pre-split, this links to agricultural divestment by mother districts anticipating territorial adjustments. Post-split, transient conservation benefits emerge due to administrative challenges impeding significant agricultural investments. Crucially, these benefits vanish, as deforestation levels between child and mother districts equalize in subsequent years. This research provides nuanced insights into the intricate interplay of state decentralization, land use dynamics, and forest outcomes in Indonesia.

This study evaluates the cost-effectiveness of two tropical forest conservation programs—public land acquisitions (PLA) and payments for environmental services (PES)—in eastern Antioquia, Colombian Andes. Over a 10–30 year period, both programs compensated landowners for relinquishing partial (PES) or total (PLA) land-use rights. Despite PES covering a larger area (67,000 vs. 9,000 hectares) due to lower initial costs and flexible tenure, PLA demonstrated greater effectiveness in preserving net forest cover. Using counterfactual impact estimation and novel forest cover change data, PLA exhibited higher relative (+9.46% vs. +0.1%) and absolute impact (+283 vs. +43.7 hectares). Cost-effectiveness, however, showed no significant difference. Surveying managers and participants revealed that both programs mitigate some social harms associated with Protected Areas but introduce their own equity concerns. This underscores the need for mindful tradeoffs in choosing between PLA and PES, emphasizing the influence of implementation opportunities, temporal factors, and the perspective of inquiry on results.

The trajectory of global emissions highly relies on developing countries' capacity to ensure effective land management, especially policies to promote forest conservation. We study the impacts of Paraguay's zero-deforestation law, a pioneer deforestation ban targeting the preservation of the Atlantic rainforest, one of the world's most threatened biomes. We assess the policy impact and effectiveness in twofold. First, we apply a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to estimating the policy's impact on deforestation. We discuss these results in light of Paraguay's forest management institutions and law enforcement. Second, we leverage unique remotely sensed data on crop cultivation and property-boundary information to track policy violations. This analysis highlights the contribution of small and large landowners to illegal deforestation and the leading agricultural practices driving it. Our study provides crucial insights into the challenges of land governance targeting deforestation mitigation.

Conserving rainforests impacts the standard of living of local populations. Moreover, human adaptation through sectoral or spatial reallocation of economic activity may undermine conservation policy goals. To derive policies that balance human and ecological well-being, this paper estimates a multi-sector spatial model that formalizes human-nature interactions using high-resolution georeferenced data from river basins in the Peruvian Amazon and plausibly exogenous variation in the river network structure. We find that the agglomeration externality in agricultural production outweighs dispersion forces in land access, implying that higher concentration leads to higher productivity with less deforestation per farmer. We also find a strong congestion externality with spatial spillovers in natural resource extraction. The agglomeration externality has quantitatively large welfare and forest cover gains but leads to natural resource depletion through general equilibrium effects. Counterfactuals demonstrate that combining well-targeted protection policies and transport infrastructure simultaneously achieve higher welfare, lower deforestation, and less natural resource depletion.

Protected areas can conserve wildlife and benefit rural people, but realizing this potential requires effective management. In Africa, national governments increasingly delegate management of protected areas to private organizations. Does private management improve outcomes compared to a counterfactual of government management? We leverage the transfer of management authority from governments to African Parks (AP)---the largest private manager of protected areas in Africa---to show that private management significantly improves wildlife outcomes via reduced elephant poaching and increased bird populations. Our results also suggest that AP's management augments tourism, while the effect on rural wealth is inconclusive. However, AP's management increases the risk of armed groups targeting civilians, which could be due to AP's improved monitoring and enforcement systems. These findings reveal an intricate interplay between conservation, economic development, and security under private protected area management in Africa.

In recent years, practitioners and researchers alike have debated whether quality of life for all can be influenced by smart cities, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Critics have shown how siloed governance arrangements, technology bias and fragmented interventions in government led smart cities programs tend to exacerbate uneven development, increase disparities in access to basic services, and can thwart equitable (re)distribution of resources, leaving city governments politically, administratively, economically and financially weaker. To address these challenges, the World Bank’s City Planning Labs (CPL) promotes an ecosystem approach to Municipal Spatial Data Infrastructure (MSDI) where technology solutions are integrated with human, legal and technical aspects. This paper shows how CPL’s successful efforts in three pilot cities in Indonesia, Semarang, Balikpapan and Denpasar (2017-21), the use of the MSDI approach brought governments closer to inhabitants during the COVID-19 crisis, creating wider demand globally for embracing ecosystem approaches to data governance for smarter cities.

This paper employs literature review and spatial analytics, including satellite imagery and cellphone-based mobility assessment, to examine intra-urban inequality in developing country cities. This structural problem is exacerbated by population growth and is linked to a range of interrelated urban challenges, including limited education and employment opportunities for people in poor neighborhoods and low productivity in the city. Furthermore, unplanned and uncoordinated urban plans and policies contribute to the misallocation of municipal resources. The paper's insights into the complex nature of intra-urban inequality are i) Intra-urban inequality is a result of the mutual relationship between the city population and welfare, ii) Small cities' population growth exacerbates intra-urban inequality more than large cities, and cities in developing countries would face rising intra-urban inequality, and iii) Planning reform requires incremental steps over time and coordination of existing rules, regulations, and emerging challenges, rather than a one-time implementation.

While the significance of urban compacity and densification is paramount for sustainable urbanism, the nuanced interplay between urban development and planning policies remains underexplored. We investigated the dynamics between planning policies, regulations, and their impact on urban morphology. The central question guiding this study is the extent to which planning policies influence urban morphology and development patterns. We integrated urban planning, spatial analytics, and a unique dataset derived from satellite imagery to quantify urban morphology spatially. The study identifies specific mechanisms within planning policies, examining the role of zoning regulations, land-use policies, and density requirements on the spatial organization of cities. The results reveal distinctive signatures of urbanization, illustrating how cities navigate growth trajectories. By integrating innovative datasets with planning regulations, the research provides fresh insights into the relationship between urban morphology and regulatory environments, emphasizing the crucial role of effective planning policies in shaping sustainable, livable, and resilient cities.

This paper summarizes a report published by the Land Tenure Committee chaired by the French Development Agency and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs. We analyze land use changes linked to urbanization in the Global South. Land commodification has become a fundamental driving force of urban expansion and economic growth but much of the data do not capture the diverse processes at work. Land commodification is not the preserve of institutional actors or private investors with well-established resources. It concerns more modest forms of investment in micro-parcels of land involving actors with much lower capital endowments. Land is acquired not only for building something but becomes for all a reserve for protecting capital and a means of accessing money. These diverse processes of land commodification, hoarding without construction and financialization must be taken into account in current discussions on land use policies, planning and regulation.

Local community participation and seeking the support of local people prior to land acquisition decisions is very essential to safeguard their land rights and livelihood options in the context of large scale land acquisitions. Obtaining free, prior and informed consent from local community is the founding principle of responsible land tenure governance. However, little research has been conducted on how community participation and consent norms function in relation to land acquisition in Ethiopia. Thus, this study aims to offer analytical understanding of how local community participation particularly free, prior and informed consent norms function in in Ethiopia. Descriptive research approach by using both qualitative and quantitative data was employed to achieve the purpose of this study. This study concludes that the practices of land acquisitions are weakly linked to the principles of responsible land governance which in turn has been deterring to realize sustainable agricultural investment in Ethiopia.

This study aims to evaluate the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover in the Menagesha Forest Catchment over the past decade. Utilizing multi-temporal remote sensing data from Landsat 7 (2010), Landsat 8 (2015), and Landsat 8 (2020), the research provides insights into the changing landscape of the Menagesha Forest Catchment and its implications for global climate change. The findings indicate a significant reduction in forest cover within the catchment area, highlighting the urgent need for afforestation initiatives and sustainable land management practices. The study emphasizes the importance of monitoring land cover dynamics in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and supports the conservation and sustainable management of forests. It is recommended that afforestation strategies are implemented by the government and the local community to address the issue of forest loss.

The research deals with the evaluation and comparison of accuracy and time expenditure of Total Station (TS), Global positioning system (GPS), and SmartStation (SS) to support urban cadastral systems. A network consisted of nine control points that were selected and measured by Total Station to test the SmartStation and GPS-RTK methods. The result of SmartStation showed that better accuracy (2.74cm) than RTK GPS (3.77cm) with reference to the established network. With reference to the time expenditure, the SmartStation way took 225 minutes to test the entire points. Whereas, the separate use of TPS and DGPS took 207 and 162 minutes respectively. Total stations and GPS RTK equipment each have their advantages. SmartStation combines the best of both. Therefore, the researchers recommend that using SmartStation is more advantageous than using separate instruments – for instance, accuracy, time, cost, and number of professionals to be engaged.

Using a 3D cadastre, urban planners can leverage visualization and modelling tools to improve the siting of buildings, determine height or depth restrictions, impose noise limitations, and plan for disaster risk reduction and also improve land governance activities.

Do land market frictions cause misallocation in agriculture? In a field experiment in Western Kenya, we randomly subsidize owners to rent out land. Transferring cultivation rights to renters increases output and value added on the plots, consistent with imperfect land markets and misallocation, and induced rentals persist after the subsidy ends. Additional analysis provides insights on the magnitude and nature of land frictions -- which include search, risks, and learning\textemdash and on the sources of gains from trade -- which include differences between owners and renters in crop choices, productivity, and financial market constraints, but not in labor constraints.

We exploit substantial variation in land-market institutions across Indian states and detailed micro household-level panel data to assess the effect of distortions in land rental markets on agricultural productivity. We provide empirical evidence that states with more rental-market activity feature less misallocation and reallocate land more efficiently over time. We develop a model of heterogeneous farms and land rentals to estimate land-market distortions in each state. Land rentals have substantial positive effects on agricultural productivity: an efficient reallocation of land increases agricultural productivity by 38 percent on average and by more than 50 percent in states with highly distorted rental markets. Both farm and state-level land market distortions are quantitatively important, with state-level wedges accounting for a significant fraction of rental market participation differences across states. Land market distortions contribute about one-third to the large differences in agricultural total factor productivity across Indian states.

I investigate how government restrictions on land markets impact the agricultural sector, and assess whether such restrictions can curb distortions that stem from the presence of market power. To do so, I develop a general-equilibrium model in which large landholders exert market power in both land and labor markets, and where there are limits on land accumulation. Restrictions reduce the inefficiencies arising from market power, but also hinder productive reallocation, with the net effect on productivity depending on initial levels of land concentration.

I empirically test the model’s predictions by estimating how a law imposing municipality-specific limits on landholdings in Colombia affected productivity, land concentration, and agricultural labor markets. I find that restrictions led to permanent reductions in productivity with modest reductions in land inequality. However, restrictions increased both agricultural workers’ earnings and the employment share in agriculture, suggesting they were beneficial for landless laborers by reducing labor market power.

I study the effects of female land inheritance on economic productivity in Ghana, by examining variation in land inheritance patterns across ethnic groups. In patriliny, land passes from fathers to sons; in matriliny, the customs are more flexible, and allow for both male and female inheritance. Male and female inheritance generate asymmetric impacts on the allocation of labor: when women inherit land, men exit agriculture, work for a wage, and receive more schooling. However, because women have more limited outside options, when men inherit, women work on their husband’s plots, and supply less total labor. The net effect of female inheritance is improved economic productivity, operating through the channel of higher male labor productivity. Men pushed to leave farming earn a non-agricultural wage premium, and are better rewarded for their human capital. This does not come at the expense of lower farm productivity, which is equal across the two regimes.

This study examines the influence of financial markets on land markets and market indicators, including land demand and speculation in Turkey. The study is quantitative research, using annual data from 2000-2023. The study will employ the ARDL model and Granger causality for the analysis. The study variables are population per kilometre (Pop/Km), bank land loan (BLL), loan to value (LTV), mortgage interest rate (Inf), and GDP per capita (GDP) and dummy variables for capturing the existence of structural break during the period of the study. The finding is expected to show that the financial market plays a significant role in Turkish land markets, including land use, land value and land speculation in general. LTV and GDP are expected to establish a positive relationship with BLL. In contrast, Pop/Km and inflation are expected to establish a negative relationship with BLL. These findings are expected to contribute to government land policy decisions.

The research aimed to assess the process, opportunities, and challenges of land information updating in the Amhara region's North Wollo Zone. The study utilized household questionnaires, focused group discussions, field observations, and document analysis. Land registration and certification began in the Amhara Region in 2003, with the updating process initiated in 2006. In the study area, 98% of rural households have registered their land and obtained first-level land certification. Land information updating occurs when there are changes in land ownership, parcel size, or shape, often through donation, inheritance, bequeathal, or land exchange. The current approach to land information updating is sporadic. Opportunities identified are such as community awareness, the presence of land administration experts, technical guidelines, and training. Challenges include informal land transfers, travel distance to administrative offices, complex updating formats, expert turnover, high fees, and surveying approaches. Addressing challenges, utilizing opportunities, and promoting long-term sustainable development are the recommendations.

Land registration programs on a large scale aimed at strengthening the land rights of farm households in Ethiopia have been executed in different degrees across different regions since 1998. This study investigates the contribution of land registration on the perceived tenure security, women and marginalized groups, and sustainable land-management practice after receiving a land holding certificate in the dryland areas, Ethiopia. Interviews were conducted with 385 households selected by using stratified random sampling techniques. The result showed 26% of households are afraid of land redistribution and farm loss in the next five years. Land registration has reduced the landlessness of women, the disabled while increasing the landlessness of youths. After registration, participation in land-management practices increased by 15%. The study determined age, household size, land management training, and livestock holdings as influential factors for increasing construction of water-harvesting systems. The findings should persuade policymakers to address potential sources of insecurity.

Do the land sales markets price in weak property rights enforcement? Imperfect land-related institutions may exacerbate distributional uncertainties and, as a result, affect land sales prices. The Ukrainian 2021 land reform launched a restricted agricultural land sales market, causing social turbulence as Ukrainians had concerns about property rights enforcement within land transactions. We argue that weak land-related institutions lead to distributional uncertainties and lower sellers' WTP and buyers’ WTA. Using two unique datasets from Ukraine, we estimate the effect of local institutions on farmland sales prices. We find that worse perceptions about land-related institutions were associated with lower land sales prices. However, the institutional effect appears to transpire only in areas with relatively competitive land markets. The results call for a holistic approach to liberal reforms with an explicit focus on institutional quality and its promotion.

Faced with strong demographic growth in Kinshasa and the challenges of food supply in this city, peri-urban agricultural concessions have become a pretext for the acquisition of vast areas of peri-urban agricultural land to then be oriented towards urbanization. . Maintaining these concessions through agricultural activities requires appropriate measures, in particular the adaptation of property taxes.

Rural land administration systems are critical for sustainable development, yet they often face challenges such as limited accessibility, inefficient and lengthy processes, non-affordable service, and a lack of transparency in the rural setup. Rural communities often face barriers in accessing land administration services due to geographical remoteness, inadequate infrastructure, and a dearth of service centers. Moreover, cumbersome, and time-consuming service provision contributes to a lack of formalized registration of land transactions.

To avert these shortcomings, mobile service delivery has emerged as a transformative force in various sectors in general and land in particular and its potential in revolutionizing rural land administration services is undeniable. This abstract underscore an in-depth exploration of the critical role of mobile service delivery in revolutionizing land administration services, emphasizing its potential to enhance efficiency and citizen engagement. As technology continues to reshape land governance, integrating mobile services into land administration processes emerges as strategic imperative.

Land fragmentation, manifested by small parcels, having an awkward shape, scattered at a considerable distance, etc., is a serious problem demanding policy action. Different policy tools that could be used to manage the problem, other than land consolidation, are not getting attention. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to comparatively analysis the different land policy instruments to tackle land fragmentation. A systematic literature review approach is mainly applied as a secondary source of data. It is found that there are many policy instruments to manage land fragmentation including voluntary land exchanges, land consolidation, land transactions, expropriation, cluster farming, cooperative farming, determining minimum parcel size, banning land re-distribution, revisiting inheritance rules, and cluster farming. Some of the policy tools may be used as preparatory initiatives for land consolidation, while others can be taken as standalone management tools. It is imperative to have comprehensive and full-fledged policies and laws for managing land fragmentation.

The Malagasy reform on going since 2005 belongs to a new generation of land reforms in Africa. Two major innovations have inter alia emerged: the creation of land offices at commune level (decentralisation of land management) and land certification. This overview communication based on collective research during more than 10 years considers the three following questions: (i) How is this reform innovative and what has it achieved in the 15 years since its inception? (ii) Does certification is really massive and inclusive or the preserve of the elites, and what are the effects at the household level?

and (iii) Have land tenure governance and institutions in Madagascar really changed?

Food security is vital for a decent life, particularly in early development and with lasting adult health effects. Forests have historically played a key role by offering essential ecosystem services and a direct source of diverse, nutrient-rich foods and medicines. This study explores the link between forests and food security in Colombian and Peruvian Amazon communities. Panel data from households in each country was collected to calculate a multidimensional household-level food security index. Our findings reveal that households with forest access have higher food security, however the effect of this depended on the quality of the forest. Indigenous communities in Colombia also relied more on the forest than non-Indigenous communities in Peru. These findings suggest that the impact of forests on food security depends on the quality of the forest, the cultural practices of those accessing the forest, and the proximity and ease of accessing the forest.

We explore the relationship between armed conflict and agricultural land use based on household data from West Africa. In contrast to previous studies, we also investigate cross-border effects of conflict. The cross-border regions are the regions where the conflict intensity is among the largest in Western Africa. Single country analysis of conflict on agricultural land fail to capture the entire effects in these regions. We employ a cross-sectional spatial approach incorporating data from Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. We find an ambiguous relationship between conflict and land use. Additionally, we find substantial heterogeneity of the relation between conflict and land use across distances. We therefore argue that the impact of conflict on land use is too heterogeneous to aggregate to a clear linear relationship.

We analyze the labor market effects of oil palm cultivation among smallholder farmers in Indonesia. Oil palm requires less labor per unit of land than alternative crops, especially less female labor. Micro-level data and nationally-representative regency-level data show that oil palm adoption, on average, led to an expansion of total cropland at the expense of forestland, resulting in higher agricultural labor demand for men. At the same time, women’s employment rates declined due to a substantial decrease in agricultural family labor, which was most evident in regions with high initial land scarcity and thus limited options for cropland expansion.

Despite the numerous initiatives for sustainable agricultural supply chains in high-income countries (HIC), there is little evidence on whether these initiatives effectively reduce environmental degradation in tropical cultivation areas. In our study, we compare patterns in oil palm planting and deforestation on peatlands in Indonesia between HIC investments, that are more frequently involved in sustainability initiatives, with domestic investments or those by neighboring low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Our dataset comprises 386 concessions in Kalimantan and Papua, their investment structure, annual maps on forest loss and oil palm cultivation, and spatial maps on peatlands. Our results show a divergence in production practices after 2011, with actors tied to HIC reducing their environmental degradation while actors from LMIC kept their practices unchanged. While this is good news in terms of the effectiveness of ‘western’ initiatives, companies from HIC have only a limited market share compared to companies from LMIC.

Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallowing requirements – the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore fertility – led to a higher prevalence of communal property rights. Longer fallowing requirements generate higher protection costs, making communal rights more beneficial. We construct an ecological measure of the optimal fallow length for the most suitable staple crop across grid cells based on soil type, temperature, and climate. We find that places where land needs to be fallowed for longer periods are more likely to have communal property rights both historically and presently. We then examine the implications for efforts to title land. We find that World Bank land titling interventions are less effective in places with longer fallowing requirements. Our results highlight the origins of property rights structures and how communal property rights interact with development policies.

Why do land titles remain so rare, even though they are available on demand throughout much of the continent? This paper introduces a novel measure of rural land values obtained by interacting geospatial data on crop suitability with yearly global commodity prices for 20 different agricultural products. Combining data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Living Standards Measurement Surveys provides region-level titling rates over time for 21 African countries. Previous research on the political economy of property rights has outlined a variety of likely drivers of land titling; I find no evidence of most of them. Households whose landholdings have higher potential returns to investments are more likely to possess a formal property right, but only in areas without strong customary institutions. By showing that economic variables are insufficient to explain formalization, this paper shows how local politics affect whether households demand formal property rights.

Formalization always takes place against a backdrop of social institutions. Yet, whether social institutions are an asset or a constraint for formalization remains unclear. We argue that, when offered the opportunity to formalize their land, citizens weigh the benefits of informal insurance against the social extraction costs imposed by social institutions. We study a randomized land titling program in a large Congolese city that caused a large increase in the demand for and acquisition of land titles. Demand for formalization was more pronounced among citizens who participated more in social institutions and had closer links to city chiefs. In turn, the program crowded out participation in social institutions and worsened citizens' perceptions of chiefs. In peripheral areas with stronger customary authorities, the program was completely ineffective. These results challenge the view that social institutions are an effective substitute for formal land property rights in urban areas.

While land titling is advocated to improve land and financial market functioning in developing country cities, evidence of credit market effects is limited. We use 20 years of registry data from Lesotho to assess impacts of an urban titling program overall and by component (titling vs. policy/institutional reforms) on land and mortgage markets by gender over time. In the longer term, both components increased land and mortgage markets activity, though at different rates. In the short term, titling did not affect mortgage markets, but policy reforms increased registered parcels’ likelihood of being mortgaged by reducing registration costs. Titling catalyzed translation of earlier family law changes to strengthen women’s property rights (that had no independent effect) into social and economic empowerment. Detailed analysis of impact channels and time profiles for titling programs’ components can provide policy-relevant insight and is relatively easy using parcel-level registry data.

Contemporary corporate governance in India largely views land as a government responsibility although it is a key financial and social risk. In this paper, with an objective to distil principles and lessons for Indian corporates, we provide an overview of emerging global instruments around land-responsible investment frameworks, tools and guidelines viz. FAO’s VGGT, USAID’s Responsible Investment Guidelines, Interlaken group’s Guideline for Respecting Land and Forest Rights, Landesa’s Responsible Investment on Property and Land, IAWG’s guidance on responsible investment and the Social and Environmental Frameworks of World Bank and IFC. We also look at corporate initiatives around voluntary commitments and delve into cases involving delays and stalling of investments as a result of such risks. We contrast these cases with Indian good practices to underline need of land tenure diligence while arguing for embedding land risk management in the ESG-risk framework of Indian Corporate Governance.

Ethiopia is known to be currently suffering from considerable food deficits. Therefore, Ethiopia has been promoting large-scale agricultural investment (LSAI) to transform the agricultural sector. In this context, GIZ and DLR entered a cooperation to develop a remote sensing approach for monitoring the actual state of land use of the LSAI areas. The approach was developed based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data using Google Earth Engine. First step is a land use/land cover classification to identify cropland. Second, different input parameters and combinations thereof were evaluated for crop type classification. The accuracies of 33 supervised random forest models were assessed for crop classification for three study areas and two years. The finally selected method is applied for crop type mapping and used to investigate class-specific accuracies. The developed methods and classification results are provided to GIZ and regional experts to support agricultural investment monitoring in Ethiopia.

This study scrutinizes the impact of climate change on land utilization in Chile, contextualizing the urgency of efficient land management amidst diminishing arable land. It delves into the paradoxes inherent in Chile's rural property system, where secure tenure coexists with governmental shortcomings in strategic territorial oversight. Despite economic growth and reduced poverty, empirical evidence from agricultural censuses spanning 1955 to 2021 reveals escalating land concentration and fragmentation. Legislative measures to combat fragmentation overlook environmental impacts, while state inaction perpetuates structural disparities in land ownership. The research posits that these issues stem from an outdated tenure model predicated on individualistic property rights, and calls for a reimagined cooperative approach that aligns with the exigencies of climate change and sustainable.

The paper critically examines how the Brazilian Amazon's federal and state land laws inadvertently incentivize forest destruction, illegal land occupation, and subsequent titling. It identifies five key incentives across nine states: continuous occupation of public lands, titling of recently deforested areas, lack of commitment to environmental liability recovery, subsidized land prices fueling speculation, and inadequate land allocation procedures. Recommendations include aligning policies with deforestation reduction, charging market prices for land sales, requiring pre-titling environmental commitments, prohibiting titling for recently deforested lands, and advocating for transparent land allocation. Brazil faces a crucial moment in determining how land laws impact forest preservation and climate goals for 2030. While the 2023 government implemented measures to improve land allocation and protect public forests, impending National Congress bills threaten to undermine these efforts, perpetuating land grabbing and forest loss.

This research addresses the phenomenon of what can be described as the “Housing Dilemma in India”. On one hand, the housing market faces a housing shortage of 18.78 million units 1, and at the same time, the housing supply in the market is flooded with unsold inventory worth INR 820 billion 2 and around 10 million units were lying vacant. The research looks into the core reason and explanation into this Housing dilemma through Land policy shift in Indian scenario. The case study of NCR Delhi being a unique administrative institution juxtaposing the complexity of Urban Land governance and development

Land occupation for construction has become the primary driving force behind the reduction of cultivated land in rural areas of China during the rapid industrialization and urbanization stage, leading to a decline in both the quantity and quality of the country's cultivated land. This study utilizes provincial data from the period 2006-2021 to investigate the impact of (industrial and population) agglomeration and local government fiscal deficits on cultivated land expropriation in China. The findings reveal that industrial agglomeration has a significant and positive impact on the expropriation of cultivated land. Although population agglomeration does not directly affect the rate of cultivated land expropriation, it significantly increases the ratio of cultivated land being converted into residential land. The local fiscal deficits (primarily at the provincial level) significantly increase the cultivated land expropriation rate.

This study explores the effect of relaxing farmland regulation on structural change and agriculture development using land reform in Chongqing, a municipality in China. Conversion of farmland to urban land is strictly constrained by the national construction land quota in China. In 2008, Chongqing invented Land Coupon System, which creates a market for farmers and firms to trade newly created construction land quota. Farmers obtain land coupons by reclaiming their rural housing to farmland and real estate firms need to purchase land coupons before bidding for a parcel of urban land to develop. I collect comprehensive transaction records of land coupons from Chongqing country land exchange. Preliminary results imply that counties supply land coupons more experience faster structural change, measured by reduction of agriculture employment share. Furthermore, reclaiming rural housing to farmland foster grain output by increasing agricultural sown area.

What is the impact of mandatory disclosures of quality on market outcomes? Does impact differ across sub-markets and income groups? We answer these questions in the context of housing markets in India where information asymmetry between homebuyers and developers is high and litigation against housing projects is common. We find that a 2017 reform mandating developers to make litigation details public led to a decline in prices of litigated housing units (lemons). We find suggestive evidence for developers lowering prices as a response to decline in sales of litigated units. Prices of litigated units declined after the reform for all but the richest income quartile of homebuyers. Further, the decline in prices was limited to the non-luxury sub-market and there was no statistically significant impact in the luxury sub-market. We provide support for disclosure laws in developing countries to reduce market inefficiencies and unequal access to information.

Large-scale land investments are often pursued as pro-poor investments by governments in developing countries. However, empirical literature on the impact of these investments has reported mixed results. In order to understand the overall impact, we undertook a meta-analysis based on estimates of 37 primary studies. On average, we find that expansion of large-scale land investments leads to a favorable impact on welfare and livelihoods of local communities (with an average standardized mean effect size of 0.043). Asset building, increasing income and enhancing food security are the pathways that make these investments beneficial to welfare and livelihoods of local communities. However, the smaller mean effect size and the heterogeneous effects across host countries indicates that much remains to be done in the implementation of regulatory and guiding frameworks of large-scale land investments formulated with an aim to respect tenure rights, livelihoods and resources so that these investments benefit the local community.

Regulatory provisions aimed at addressing humanitarian concerns for landowners affected by land conversions, like prior consent, fair negotiation, and adequate compensation exist but in practice are wrought with challenges. This raises important questions on the nature of negotiation processes and factors that influence outcomes; questions which our paper pursues. Using a multi case study approach of two cases, the first involving conversions by a large-scale mine and the second, conversions by small-scale mines, we found that in both cases, compensations paid were below recommended and standard rates, a situation which was worse for outright payments but more favourable in share arrangements of mining proceeds in the second case. Factors affecting negotiations included information asymmetry, lack of sound financial valuations, threats and social pressures on farmers. We recommend that shared arrangements, in the form of a mining fund which are disbursed periodically to farmers would yield more sustainable outcomes.

Information about land tenure in Brazil is uncertain and controversial due to multiple reasons including a confusing legal framework that leads to institutional overlaps, the lack of a long-term land administration policy and an integrated land cadaster. We update and compare the new results from the Brazilian Land Atlas (Atlas Agropecuário) with Sparovek et al (2019) developing an integrated map of Brazilian land tenure encompassing all official datasets on land tenure from the different institutions and with data from both public and private lands. Moreover, we present an in-depth analysis for the states within the Legal Amazon, identifying the amount of public land still to be designated and estimate a time frame based on previous initiatives. At last, we propose policies for improving land use planning and governance in the near future.

Advancements in geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing technology in recent years have led to the development of decision support tools adopted by institutions globally to make prudent socio-economic planning, monitoring, and developments. In this study, we demonstrate how African countries can leverage these technologies to identify suitable land for private-sector investments in agricultural value chains using Malawi as our case study. Firstly, we mapped the suitable areas for growing priority crops for investment based on environmental conditions using a machine learning modeling framework. Secondly, we incorporated a multi-criteria decision analysis model to identify the optimum areas based on access to infrastructure, markets, and population density. Ultimately, this study aims to develop a robust methodology that can be replicated in other African countries to enhance their capacity to implement the AU Guiding Principles of large-scale land-based investment and protect the local communities while attracting private sector investments.

We investigate the impact of a significant property rights reform on distributional preferences in rural Beninese villages. This reform replaced the informal use-rights over land, which were traditionally prevalent, with a system resembling private ownership. Our study employs a combination of a randomized controlled trial implementation of the reform across villages and lab-in-the-field experiments to elicit the distributional choices of villagers. We examine participants' preferences in situations where inequality arises from luck as well as situations where inequality is based on merit considerations. The findings reveal that the reform, which aligns allocation rules with impersonal market-like institutions, enhances participants' acceptance of luck-based inequality. However, we find no discernible effect of the reform on participants' tolerance for merit-based inequality. These results contribute to our understanding of the impact of institutional changes on distributional preferences and have implications for the design of economic systems.

Governments often institute transferability restrictions over property rights to protect owners and communities, but these restrictions impose costs: lowering property values, limiting investment, and increasing transaction costs. We study the long-run impacts of transferability restrictions using a natural experiment affecting millions of acres of Native American reservation land, by comparing non-transferable allotted-trust parcels with transferable fee-simple parcels. We use satellite imagery to study differences in land use across tenure types by leveraging fine-grained fixed effects to compare immediate neighbors. We find that fee-simple plots are 13% more likely to be developed and have 35% more land in cultivation.

In low-income countries, agriculture is hindered by inefficient land allocation and farm fragmentation, raising costs and preventing adoption of technologies that benefit from scale. Research indicates that land markets are underdeveloped, with risks and coordination issues that impede effective trading. Experiments in Uganda and Kenya demonstrate that market design can significantly enhance efficiency by thickening markets, finding chains, and enforcing conditional contracts, but right-in-theory designs may be unfamiliar and hard for farmers to understand. In Uganda, we find large efficiency gains from a simple market design improvement, a centralization intervention that brings farmers together to trade at a set time. In Kenya, a computerized system aggregation intervention, which allows traders to specify a sequence of conditional trades as a single transaction yielded good results. These findings suggest that strategic market design can alleviate trading frictions, boost productivity for smallholder farmers, and complement other initiatives like land titling.

To reduce conflict, empower women, and foster investment and credit access, India’s SVAMITVA program has, since 2020, created the legal basis for issuing property cards (PCs) to habitation land and, in a systematic, low-cost, village-wide process, mapped or issued PCs to more than 80 and 10 million properties, respectively. We use quarterly branch-level data for 2016-2023 to assess the impact of PC issuance on volume of bank credit and deposits in Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Uttar Pradesh (UP), two states accounting for 73% of PCs issued so far. PCs increased credit access in MP where PCs are integrated with digital land records and banks can register charges online, but not in UP where records cannot be used or maintained digitally. Parallel trend for pre-intervention outcomes cannot be rejected and placebo tests (using drone survey) show no effect. Record use and maintenance arrangements seem a key determinant of land titling’s impact.

Based on rich cadastral data we examine the effects of land privatization on pasture productivity. We identify the causal effect using a design with a staggered absorbing treatment and heterogeneous treatment effects accounting for spatial spillovers. We collect a balanced panel of 16 thousand plots located in southern Kazakhstan including precise land allocation dates and remotely sensed geographic and climatic features over 24 years. Results show that land allocation has a significantly negative effect on the pasture vegetation comparable with a drought occurring once in 25 year for individual farms and ones in six years for all users on average. Controlling for the spatial spillover of privatization of neighboring land further aggravates the negative effects of titling especially in proximity to settlements. Pasture privatization under a restricted land market with imperfect institutions and high transaction costs distorts existing grazing practices and causes pastures to deteriorate.

This study examines the effects of the land registration and certification programme introduced in 1998 in the Tigray region of Ethiopia on agricultural productivity, climate change mitigation and adaptation. We use satellite-based measures of greenness and implement a difference-in-differences approach, comparing pixels on both sides of the Tigray-Amhara regional border. Results show positive and persistent effects of the programme on agricultural productivity and climate change mitigation. By examining years when adverse climate and weather events occurred, we also find evidence of increased adaptation to climate change. We show that our results are consistent with the reform enhancing farmers’ tenure security and inducing an increase in the adoption of climate smart agricultural practices.

Agricultural land is crucial for household welfare in many developing countries, and its distribution is a key determinant of achieving inclusive economic growth and transformation. Traditionally, measures of agricultural land inequality have centered on farm size distribution, using information from agricultural census data. In this paper, we propose a new conceptual framework for measuring agricultural land inequality, along with a set of derived indicators. These account, beyond land area, for additional aspects of land quality and land rights, and also consider the landless population. Our proposal introduces a reliable, cross-country comparable set of indicators. Its aim is to monitor the evolution of land inequality and its connection to development outcomes by utilizing data from both living conditions household surveys and agricultural censuses. Using data from five sub-Saharan African countries, results indicate overall inequality has increased. Furthermore, accounting for land with secure tenure rights significantly increases land inequality.

In cases where land governance reforms and intensified socio-economic development are components of negotiated political settlements, how can state and non-state actors navigate multiple land claims in areas associated with multiple indigenous groups, protracted displacement, and resultant plural land tenure regimes? This paper describes a collaborative mapping process initiated in sites in the province of Maguindanao del Sur in Southern Philippines associated with the 2014 peace agreement between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Government of the Philippines, as well as a pending ancestral domain claim filed by the Tëduray-Lambangian indigenous community. Building on iterative conversations and collaborative mapping from December 2020 to March 2022, the work uses administrative and community-generated information to facilitate hard conversations on desired development trajectories and explore viable ways forward. The paper concludes with recommendations for the use of spatial data for mediation and systematic adjudication in the context of implementing a peace deal.

This paper analyzes the impact of urban land-use changes on farmers’ livelihood around the city of Bahir Dar (Ethiopia). A survey was conducted in three urbanizing villages near Bahir Dar, focusing on 150 farmers who were land-expropriated and 180 farmers who were non-land-expropriated. Regression models and propensity matching scoring are applied to examine the livelihood differences of farmers in terms of farm income, off-farm income, primary expenditure type, and perception of urban expansion benefits to farmers. The results reveal that land expropriation in the area has led to (a) a shift to off-farm income for land expropriated farmers; (b) an increase in their household expenditure on staple foods compared to other expenditure types, including farm inputs; and (c) diverging perceptions on whether and how city expansion benefits farmers in the neighboring villages.

We present an urban model with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry regarding risks of contested land ownership, a very common issue in sub-Saharan African cities. A market failure emerges as sellers do not internalize the impact of their market participation decision on the average quality of traded plots, which in turn affects other sellers and buyers' decisions. As a result, the equilibrium has too many transactions of insecure plots and too few transactions of secure plots. This market failure can be addressed when agents trade along trusted kinship lines that discourage undisclosed sales of insecure plots. When sellers also have the possibility of registering their property right in a cadastre, this not only further attenuates information asymmetry but also helps reduce risk. Because transactions between kins tend to involve plots that are more secure on average, kinship matching makes registration better targeted at insecure plots traded outside kinship ties.

Fragmented land administration and market distortions stymie affordable housing development, exacerbates informality, hampers economic development, and limits revenues in major Nigerian cities. Several constraints prevent the development of a healthy land market and restrict urban planning practice, limit private-sector investment, and thus hinder sustainable development in major cities. For example, as a result of the deficiencies in the 1978 Land Use Act, the legal framework for land administration, most land claims are insecure and even state-granted titles can be revoked. State and local governments have little information about the location, ownership, or use of specific parcels.

The paper investigates the key land challenges that hinder development in the three largest cities in Nigeria: Lagos, Kano and Ibadan. Based on the analysis, the paper will identify areas of reforms in land management that are necessary to better manage informal growth and foster better planning and development.

Where and how cities grow will influence food production and the risks to food production. We estimate the overlap of future urban expansion in 2040 and 2100 with current crop and livestock production under different climate scenarios. First, we find, that urban areas will expand most into areas with fruits, vegetables, and chickens, and that urban areas will expand most under a scenario with significant challenges to climate change mitigation. Second, the share of food producing areas that will overlap with urban expansion will be largest in Africa, particularly under a scenario of significant challenges to climate change adaptation. Third, across all scenarios, urban expansion is likely to take place in areas with higher crop or livestock production, but even more so when there are significant challenges to both mitigation and adaptation.

Land conversion to agriculture is a defining environmental challenge for tropical regions. We construct a novel panel dataset of land-use changes on the properties of municipal politicians and campaign donors in the Brazilian Amazon to assess channels through which local politics may drive land conversion. Estimating event studies around close mayoral elections, we find that large landholders significantly increase soy cultivation while the candidate they donated to is in office. This suggests landholders invest in political influence to overcome barriers to agricultural intensification. In turn, mayors who receive landholder donations govern in favor of agriculture – increasing spending on agricultural promotion and distribution of rural credit. While agricultural promotion “returns the favor” for mayors’ donors, it is not precisely targeted. We document large spillovers onto non-donor properties, resulting in increased deforestation and environmental violations. Results reveal how patronage and special interests drive land-use change and deforestation in the Amazon.

Agricultural commodity booms can improve rural incomes and livelihoods, but also accelerate land-use change. Where land-use rights are unclear and economic institutions non-cohesive, such booms can trigger social conflict over land. We investigate this phenomenon in Indonesia, where rising global demand caused a large expansion in oil palm area over the past decades. Based on a yearly panel of 2,755 rural sub-districts from 2005 to 2014, we link detailed data on local conflicts to variations in plantation expansion incentives. We show that local incentives to establish new plantations lead to violent disputes over land, resources and political representation. The adverse consequences increase with the importance of income from land, and are more pronounced in areas where land is more contestable and unequally distributed. Our findings underline the importance of Indonesia’s ongoing land reform efforts and the necessity of rural land transformation to go hand in hand with conflict mitigation strategies

We study the effect of agricultural expansion on conflict in pastoral territories of Africa. Using geocoded data on development projects across Africa from 1995-2014, we find that implementing agricultural projects in traditionally pastoral areas leads to a two-fold increase in the risk of conflict. We find no equivalent effect for agricultural projects implemented in traditionally agricultural areas, nor for non-agricultural projects implemented in either location. We also find that this mechanism contributes to the spread of extremist-religious conflict in the form of jihadist attacks. Our effects are muted when agricultural projects are paired with pastoral projects. This is more likely to occur when pastoral groups have more political power. Despite these effects on conflict, we find that crop agriculture projects increase nighttime luminosity in both agricultural and pastoral areas. Our results indicate that "development mismatch"--i.e., imposing projects that are misaligned with local populations--can be costly.

The widespread prevalence of unexploded landmines in many countries leads to thousands of deaths and injuries annually and can block the productive use of contaminated land. We study the clearance of more than 15,000 hazardous areas in Afghanistan carried out since 1992. We identify a window during which a policy shift in clearance targeting created plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of clearance, which we study using a two-way fixed effects panel design. The clearance of hazardous areas leads to changes in land use observed using multispectral, moderate-resolution Landsat-series imagery, as well as to increases in economic activity reflected in nighttime lights data. Our precise clearance data and satellite imagery allows us to observe the shifts occurring even in the small towns and villages that comprise most of our sample. We also find reductions in conflict risks due to the clearance of hazardous areas.

The study assessed the effect of integrated and substitutable soil fertility management technologies on maize yield, productivity and food security of smallholder farmers in Southwest Ethiopia. As the MESR model result revealed, adoption of at least one soil fertility management technology has a huge potential of improving rural households’ wellbeing through an increased yield, productivity and food security. The investigation result further revealed, from the three adoption combinations of integrated and substitutable soil fertility management technologies, lonely adoption of organic fertilizer and joint adoption of the two technology groups was found to have a significant effect on maize yield, productivity and food security. Unlikely, the isolated adoption of inorganic fertilizer may not result in an intended food security outcome. Thus, for the simultaneous improvement in maize yield, productivity and food security, the study recommends to concentrate either on the joint practice of the two technologies or organic fertilizer alone.

Climate change poses significant risks, manifesting in extreme weather events, armed conflicts, and economic instability, hindering sustainable livelihoods. Land tenure challenges impede the adoption of climate-smart agriculture in rural areas. This research explores the impact of land tenure systems and institutional factors on low-emission food systems (LEFS) adoption. Investigating secure land tenure, optimal land size, resource access equity, collaborative land governance, and climate-conscious land use planning, the study identifies mechanisms contributing to LEFS implementation. The findings offer valuable insights into land tenure's role in promoting sustainable livelihoods and resilient agriculture amid climate change challenges.

Agriculture is reported among the main causes of anthropogenic global warming. At the same time, it is profoundly impacted by climate change and concurrently holds potential as a solution through the sequestration of soil organic carbon (SOC) facilitated by Conservation Agriculture (CA). However, the findings in the literature are controversial on the SOC sequestration capacity and the profitability of CA implementation. Considering the new and old objectives of the sector, this paper tackles the assessment of the actual capabilities of CA to be a viable strategy to pursue the social good of climate change mitigation and concurrently be profitable for farmers. The economic profitability and environmental performance of CA are assessed analysing data from a field experiment in Northern Italy and identifying the best management practice.

In sub-Saharan African countries, development strategies focus on optimizing agricultural and forestry resources through collaboration with both foreign and domestic investors, aiming for economic development by integrating capital, technology, and market access. However, concerns arise about their impact on marginalized groups and the environment. We evaluated the legal and policy frameworks in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Mozambique to establish an enabling environment for sustainable and inclusive land-based investments. Using literature reviews and content analysis, the research reveals inconsistent implementation of investment incentives and limited legal rights concerning land resources. Implications highlight the importance of legitimate land tenure systems, gender-responsive and socially inclusive approaches, streamlined land acquisition processes, and heightened environmental awareness. The study concludes with policy recommendations for multi-stakeholder platforms, emphasizing transformative, green, and inclusive land investments, requiring the reconciliation of customary rights with formal legal land governance systems for a seamless integration of traditional practices and contemporary regulatory frameworks.

The foundation of effective property taxation is identifying and addressing all properties. Yet in lower-income countries this continues to pose a major challenge. We argue that this is often the result of inappropriate legal frameworks and institutional structures. Most countries rely on “cadaster-first” approaches requiring that properties be legally registered with national governments before being subject to taxation. This is conceptually intuitive, but has posed often insurmountable barriers to effective administration in lower-income contexts owing to data limitations, high costs, institutional complexity, vulnerability to corruption and misaligned incentives. We demonstrate that outcomes can often be substantially, and rapidly, improved by adopting “property tax first” approaches that allow for simpler, more decentralized, processes of property identification and addressing for property tax purposes that do not rely on formal titling and registration of ownership. We draw on examples from Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Togo and Zambia.

We report the results of efforts to strengthen public trust and tax compliance as part of a novel property tax reform in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The program involved comprehensive modernization of property tax administration, coupled with the introduction of participatory budgeting to expand citizen voice and strengthen service delivery. We draw on three rounds of surveys, and access to administrative data, to study whether being invited to participate in the participatory budgeting process – and seeing services subsequently delivered, leads to more positive attitudes and greater tax compliance. We find large and statistically significant impacts on attitudes toward the city council and administration, along with expanded political support for the Mayor. Impact on compliance are, however, more mixed and conditional on initial attitudes: compliance increases among those who support the mayor and support expanded taxation at baseline, but actually declines among political opponents who are generally opposed to expanded taxation.

Property tax collection in Zambia under-performs when compared to a number of African countries, owing in part to the existence of a dual tenure system which hampers local governments’ ability to raise revenue on customary land. Pursuing property taxation on customary land would require improved collaboration and information sharing between local councils and traditional leaderships, but also buy-in from owners living under the authorities of chiefs, who have historically reported low levels of trust in local councils’ ability to provide public services. Using novel data of 2’400 property owners in three councils of Zambia, equally distributed among owners who are property tax compliant and non-compliant, in informal settlements and on customary land, we use conjoint analysis to investigate (1) whether owners express a preference for a collaboration between local and traditional authorities in raising property tax, and (2) what drives owners’ preferences in the design of a property tax policy.

Cities are crucial in driving climate action, but grapple with financial limitations. In India, local governments heavily depend on grants from state and central governments to meet their expenditure needs. Strengthening their principle revenue source, property tax, can provide them with greater leverage for climate-related spending. Although property tax revenues have surged in the recent past, this growth stems largely from process enhancements propelled by monetary incentives from central government. To further boost revenues, Indian cities require greater autonomy from states to broaden their tax base. By examining how Indian cities have improved tax collection efficiency, valuable insights can be gleaned for other developing nations. Concurrently, India can draw lessons from countries that have successfully overcome political hurdles to broaden their tax bases. This presentation will delve into past achievements and future possibilities, emphasizing the pivotal role of property tax reforms in advancing climate action and fostering cross-national learning opportunities.

I study the long-run economic effects of land concentration on the American frontier. Using quasi-random variation in initial land allocations from a checkerboard formula, I analyze a large database of property assessments and find that historical concentration reduced modern land values by 4.5% and fixed capital by 23%. Modern effect sizes are 23%-64% of their historical equivalents, indicating significant rates of both persistence and convergence over the last 150 years. Using archival data on tenant contracts, I argue that the low-powered incentives of share agreements discouraged investment by large-scale owners with long-term effects.

We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party that affected local state capacity across Mexican municipalities and over time. Our difference-in-differences and instrumental variable identification strategies exploit a national shock that threatened the Mexican government’s hegemony in the early 1960s.

Governments often implement large-scale redistribution policies to gain enduring political support. However, little is known on whether such policies generate sizable gains, whether these gains are persistent, and why. We study the political consequences of a major land reform in Italy. A panel spatial regression discontinuity design shows that the reform generated large electoral gains for the incumbent Christian Democratic party. The electoral effects persist over four decades. We explore several channels and find that clientelist brokering and patronage are plausible mechanisms for this persistence.

This paper analyzes the role of land ownership in factor reallocation and structural transformation. Using a novel dataset, I show that the massive land reform enforced by the Allies after World War II, which redistributed the ownership of farmlands from landlords to tenants, led farmers to use more low-cost agricultural technologies when they became available and to rely less on family labor for production, resulting in an increase in the outmigration of the young population from rural to urban areas. A quantitative exercise using a two-sector neoclassical growth model indicates that the impact of the factor reallocation was considerable.

In a world with increasing climate change and intensifying food insecurity, agricultural productivity is central to development. Increasing agricultural productivity requires a detailed understanding of cultivated land and its limitations, and how these shortcomings can be addressed. In this regard, both land quality and quantity play a critical role. The ability to appropriately estimate the degree to which these inputs positively or negatively affect production is dependent on accurate measurement. With an evolving technological landscape, the menu of tools available to potentially measure land quality and quantity, particularly in cost-effective and scalable ways, is expanding. Through a methodological survey experiment implemented in Uganda, we set out to validate innovative approaches for measuring area (land quantity) and soil health (land quality) and assess their feasibility for implementation in household survey contexts as well as the policy-relevant implications of their use.

While monitoring soil quality provides indispensable inputs in agricultural policies in Africa, it is expensive and a logistical challenge to collect high-quality data on soil quality from the traditional household survey. We offer an early assessment of an alternative, less expensive imputation-based method to address this data gap. The central idea is to leverage a smaller benchmark sample with high-quality soil data—in combination with a larger survey without any soil quality data (or with low-quality soil data)—to generate imputation-based estimates in the larger survey. Preliminary results for Ethiopia and Uganda are very encouraging, suggesting that imputation-based estimates are reasonably close to the estimates based on the benchmark surveys. If replicated in other contexts, including for other agricultural variables, these results could open up a new and cost-effective way to address the challenge of missing soil quality data for Sub-Saharan African countries.

We assess the reliability of measured farm sizes (ownership holdings) in the Living Standard Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) in Ethiopia and Malawi based on three survey rounds (2012, 2014, 2016) in Ethiopia and four rounds (2010, 2013, 2016, 2019) in Malawi. By using the balanced panel of households that participated in all the rounds, we utilized the within-household variation in reported and measured ownership holdings that were mostly measured with GPSs and/or with rope and compass. While this gives reliable measures of reported holdings, we detect substantial under-reporting of parcels over time within households that largely have been overlooked in previous studies. We find that the estimated farm sizes within survey rounds are substantially downward biased due to systematic and stochastic under-reporting of parcels. Such biases are substantial in the data from both countries, in all survey rounds, and in all regions of each country.

We report the results of two survey experiments designed to shed light on a persistent mystery in rural household survey data from Africa: why there are so many fewer self-reported landlords (renters-out) than tenants (renters-in).

We find that nudging induces a significant increase in the reported rate of renting-in parcels but has negligible effects on reported rates of renting-out and sharecropping out. However, our list experiment indicates much higher revealed rates of renting out (14-15%) than is reflected in the nominal plot-roster responses (3%). The magnitude of the latter finding fully explains the apparent difference in renting in vs. renting out rates derived from the regular parcel roster responses. Our results demonstrate that simple nudged embedded in survey designs can improve reporting rates in land market participation while the list experiment findings hint the need for specialized survey designs to understand true level of land market participation in similar contexts.

The paper analyses all 16 LVC instruments discussed in the literature and used internationally, classified into three groups, according to their three sources of government authority: (a) government ownership of land; (b) the power to regulate land uses / land–use parameters on both private and public land; and (c) the power to impose taxes and fees (fiscal instruments) on private land/property. The instruments are analyzed within a unified framework that is comprised of multiple characteristics (e.g., potential public benefit, breadth of the payers’ base, scope of global usage, critical pre-requisites and implementation requirements, etc.).

The Dutch system for real estate assessment for government purposes, such as taxation, operates on an ad valorem system, based on the market value of the property with full legal ownership on the valuation date. The assessed value serves as the tax base for several local and national taxes for a total of 11 billion euros yearly. The assessment process is the responsibility of (joint services centers of) municipalities with oversight on the quality by the Netherlands Council for Real Estate Assessment (NCREA). Every five years a thematic research is done on the discrepancy between the assessed values and the observed market values, the sales price for all residential properties in the Netherlands. Based on the sales prices and assessed values in the period 2018 up to 2022, this research is current done together with the University of Twente, and the findings are presented and explained.

The Land Value chain cuts across national, state and provincial governments that normally administer the titling, registration and cadaster, and local governments that must service the land and realize tax revenues where applicable. Integration between these tiers of government, or rather the lack thereof, hinders the holistic management of the land base of countries, which often leads to poor land use and spatial planning. Property tax dates to over 2000 years ago, so it is inconceivable that some of the fastest growing cities in the world have land information systems that are ineffective and outdated. Cities require finances to operate effectively, and land taxes do not contribute to the city financing, economy or GDP. This paper examines the entire land value chain, look at the interoperability of data and systems and suggest an approach to overcome the issues faced, using modern technologies and practical approaches.

Accurate land valuation promotes fairness and efficiency in the property market, aiding property development and land use planning. Land price is also a key component for property valuation using cost approach, particularly with 3D models like Building Information Modeling (BIM). Identifying and creating a database on value-related features is essential to establishing a robust land valuation system. Advanced Machine Learning techniques can handle non-linear relationships between land value and the driving factors. This study analyzes factors affecting land prices in Melbourne Metropolitan, considering a wide range of features. The importance of each factor is calculated through an ensemble method based on four techniques: Random Forest, XGBoost, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) and Mutual Information (MI). The results show that land area, longitude, land use, latitude, distance to the Central Business District (CBD), elevation, mortgage rate and primary school zone have the highest impact on the land value in the study area.

Large Earth “Foundation Models” are a newer approach to AI that don’t require extensive machine learning and earth observation capacity. This opens up their use to vastly more end users and critical needs.

Earth Index, an open-source project of the non-profit Earth Genome, rethinks environmental monitoring. Regardless of technical background, this approach enables creation of actionable, locally fine-tuned maps of environmental trends through iterative human-in-the-loop training of machine-learning models. Earth Index's practical applications are numerous, from tracking gold mining in the Amazon to uncovering previously unmapped Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in the American South. See also https://www.earthgenome.org/

Clay, a non-profit, is dedicated to building the open-source geospatial foundational AI models that power applications like Earth Index and others. Clay is scaling climate and sustainability solutions by growing an ecosystem of models and data that harness the power of Earth information. See also https://madewithclay.org/

Investments in transportation infrastructure can impact the environment beyond their immediate surroundings. We build an inter-regional trade model to estimate the general equilibrium effects of changes in infrastructure on deforestation. Using panel data on the evolution of the transportation network from Brazil and land use data in the Amazon, we estimate the model and find sizable effects of infrastructure on deforestation. Model simulations show that ignoring general equilibrium underestimates deforestation impacts by one quarter. We also show that this model can be used to evaluate the deforestation induced by individual projects, an essential input for public policies.

How will future climate change affect rural economies like sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in terms of migration and welfare losses? How can policy enhance SSA's capacity to adapt to this process? I answer these questions with a quantitative framework that, coupled with rich spatial data and forecasts for the future, estimates millions of climate migrants and sizeable and unequal welfare losses in SSA. Investigating migration and trade policies as mitigating tools, I find a trade-off associated with the former: reducing SSA migration barriers eliminates aggregate welfare losses at the cost of more climate migration and high regional inequality. Reducing tariffs attenuates this cost.

This paper studies the e ect of weather shocks on rural land sales and the farm size distribution. Using a unique administrative dataset with transaction-level information and a land registry covering most of Colombia's farmland, we show that extreme temperature events increase the frequency of land sales and decrease the average farm size within municipalities. These results are driven by small farms being subdivided and purchased by previously landless owners, with no evidence of weather shocks leading to the consolidation of small farms into larger holdings. The effects of extreme temperature on land sales are stronger in poorer and more isolated municipalities, where landowners are also less likely to take out land mortgages after a shock. To explain these patterns and explore how they can be exacerbated by underdevelopment, we develop an intertemporal, two-sector model where agents face a subsistence consumption constraint.

We experimentally evaluate whether an interest-based negotiation (IBN) training for community leaders in Liberia improves their ability to strike beneficial deals related to their land and forests. We use environmental assessments, lab-in-the-field, and surveys and find that trainees are 27% more likely to reach a beneficial agreement, and when they conclude deals, their payoffs are 37% larger. Our exploration of mechanisms indicates that the training increases trainees' capacity to identify valuable deals, but does not improve their appraisal of their outside option. We find a reduction (0.27 standard deviations) in the exploitation of communal forestland in treated communities.

This study presents the endline findings of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Burkina Faso Rural Land Governance (RLG, 2009—2014) project evaluation. The study includes a causal impact analysis for indicators that can be addressed rigorously, including: investment behavior on land (e.g., constructing buildings, planting permanent crops, improving irrigation infrastructures or electricity, investing in various agricultural inputs), use of collateralized credit for land improvements, fear of loss of land (e.g., because of government expropriation, lack of documents, or other villagers), total number of conflicts on land, general perception of land security (e.g., whether the individual fears the arrival of new populations to exploit the land for agricultural purposes), perception of inequality in access to land for women. The impact evaluation found no effects on perceptions of land tenure security, land conflict frequency and occurrence, producers’ investment decisions, and incomes and livelihoods.

Under-utilisation of land as collateral for loans is often attributed to the poor quality of the land records infrastructure, which is seen to both increase the cost of closing credit transactions and the risk of collection if a loan fails. In this paper, we examine the link between the heterogeneity of the quality of the land records infrastructure across states in India and the access to credit by households using two new data sets for the analysis. Our findings indicate a weak link between the borrowing patterns of households and the quality of land records infrastructure, particularly the availability of spatial records. This is a departure from perceptions in the literature and policy discourse which suggests a strong linkage between access to formal credit and the land records infrastructure in states. This paper contributes to the literature on the interface between land and access to credit in a developing economy.

Most rural land in Africa is not formally documented, potentially leading to low tenure security and limited land investment incentives. We test whether subsidies for women farmers in Mozambique can boost the impact of land registration on agricultural investment. In a first stage, half of study participants were offered assistance obtaining a no-cost land registration certificate. In a second stage, all participants were offered a package of agricultural inputs, at a randomly selected subsidy. While we find high demand for land registration, it did not significantly increase willingness to pay for the agricultural inputs, regardless of subsidy level. In contrast, subsidies had a large effect on willingness to pay: every 2,000MZN increase in subsidy increased purchase probability by 11 percentage points. Our findings cast doubt on the land registration-investment policy argument and suggest that liquidity constraints are a more important constraint undermining women farmers' investment incentives.

This study investigates the impact of Vietnam’s 2013 Land Law on land transactions, efficiency, labor market and overall household welfare using difference-in-differences method. Plot-level DID results reveal that annual plots which are directly affected by the law are 3 (or 6) percentage points more likely to be leased out (or sold) than perennial land plots. However, there is no significant effect on the likelihood of annual plots being leased in or bought relative to perennial land, highlighting that tenure security affects land supply more than land demand. As both rental and sale markets transfer land from less productive to more productive farmers, the more active land markets incentivized by the law would enhance land use efficiency. Household-level analysis shows that the passage of the law is associated with a shift from self-employed farm work to wage employment, especially in agricultural wag work, and a higher-level per capita household expenditure.

The successful case of Bogotá in the continuous updating of cadastral information is analyzed. It is argued that the accurate identification of property, the recognition of market dynamics to determine real accurate property valuations, and the implementation of progressive taxation are crucial to address the economic and social gap in these urban areas. In a context where poverty levels are significant, tax collection emerges as a central pillar for sustainable development. The Bogotá case illustrates how a proactive approach to cadastral updating, a frontal fight against corruption, and the implementation of progressive fiscal policies can act as catalysts to mitigate inequality and promote equitable growth in Latin American cities.

...

..