The number of people in South Asia's cities rose by 130 million between 2000 and 2011--more than the entire population of Japan. This was linked to an improvement in productivity and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But the region's cities have struggled to cope with the pressure of population growth on land, housing, infrastructure, basic services, and the environment. As a result, urbanization in South Asia remains underleveraged in its ability to deliver widespread improvements in both prosperity and livability. Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia is about the state of South Asia's urbanization and the market and policy failures that have taken the region’s urban areas to where they are today--and the hard policy actions needed if the region’s cities are to leverage urbanization better. This publication provides original empirical and diagnostic analysis of urbanization and related economic trends in the region. It also discusses in detail the key policy areas, the most fundamental being urban governance and finance, where actions must be taken to make cities more prosperous and livable.

This book provides insights into commercial and residential real estate markets in one of the world’s fastest growing regions: South Asia. Despite being the growth leader of the future, South Asia is among the "least integrated" regions with a large need for real-estate-specific information and knowledge. Scholars and industry practitioners from a variety of backgrounds come together to provide pan-regional and country-specific insights into—amongst others—institutional, economic and real estate market characteristics, real-estate-specific legislation, real estate financing, development and urban planning practices in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. A particular focus of the book is on topics such as the provision of affordable housing, sustainability, innovative office concepts such as co-working and the development of real estate investment trust (REIT) markets in South Asia. This book integrates knowledge on real estate markets in and across South Asian countries by means of country profiles and case studies to provide industry professionals, policy makers and scholars with a fundamental understanding of characteristics, opportunities and challenges in the region. The book is intended for readers with interests in real estate development, finance and investment, urban planning and housing in South Asia. It is also suitable as a reference textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in programs focusing on real estate, economic development, urban planning and public policy in South Asia and other emerging countries.

Questions of who can access land and who is excluded from it underlie many recent social and political conflicts in Southeast Asia. Powers of Exclusion examines the key processes through which shifts in land relations are taking place, notably state land allocation and provision of property rights, the dramatic expansion of areas zoned for conservation, booms in the production of export-oriented crops, the conversion of farmland to post-agrarian uses, “intimate” exclusions involving kin and co-villagers, and mobilizations around land framed in terms of identity and belonging. In case studies drawn from seven countries, the authors find that four “powers of exclusion”—regulation, the market, force and legitimation—have combined to shape land relations in new and often surprising ways. Land debates are often presented as a conflict between market-oriented land use with full private property rights on the one side, and equitable access, production for subsistence, and respect for custom on the other. The authors step back from these debates to point out that any productive use of land requires the exclusion of some potential users, and that most projects for transforming land relations are thus accompanied by painful dilemmas. Rather than counterposing “exclusion” to “inclusion,” the book argues that attention must be paid to who is excluded, how, why, and with what consequences. Powers of Exclusion is a path-breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond.

April 1997 The authors review the literature on land markets in South Asia to clarify what's known and to highlight unresolved issues. They report that: -We have a good understanding of why sharecropping persists and why it can be superior to other standard agricultural contracts. We have less understanding of what determines the relative efficiency of sharecropping in different environments and why other apparently superior contractual relationships are rare.-Insecure rights to land adversely affect production and investment incentives in areas outside of South Asia, but in South Asia strong evidence linking investment and rights to production is scarce.-An inverse relationship between farm size and output per unit area is a recurrent feature in data from South Asia, apparently related to land-labor interactions.-Although small farms seem to be more efficient than large ones, small farmers have trouble raising their profitability and enlarging their holding, largely because of credit constraints, but also because of poverty and policy that discriminates against them.-Misguided land reform in the past has made tenancy unattractive to landowners, so large capital-intensive farms have developed. Political economic analysis is needed to explain the failure of past land reform, as well as distortions in agricultural input and output markets in South Asia.-Land fragmentation (as distinguished from farm size) has caused productivity losses. Those losses have not been quantified and the reasons fragmentation persists are poorly understood.-Transaction costs are a significant impediment to functioning land markets. In South Asia, transfers of land rights are complicated by lack of explicit title to land, and by informal and customary rights.-One pressing research problem is gender discrimination, an important factor in land market imperfections -especially (within the household) the separation of land management and its control. Research needs include more systematic regional comparisons, the use of more panel data, and an investigation of how agricultural productivity is affected by gender problems and land fragmentation.

An analysis of gender and property throughout South Asia which argues that the most important economic factor affecting women is the gender gap in command over property.

This book explores the historical roots of rapid economic growth in South Asia, with reference to politics, markets, resources, and the world economy. Roy posits that, after an initial slow period of growth between 1950 and the 1980s, the region has been growing rapidly and fast catching up with the world on average levels of living. Why did this turnaround happen? Does it matter? Is it sustainable? The author answers these questions by drawing connections, comparisons, and parallels between the five large countries in the region: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It shows why, despite differences in political experience between these countries, similarities in resources and markets could produce similar trajectories. Home to a fifth of the world’s population, South Asia’s transformation has the power to change the world. Most accounts of the process focus on individual nations, but by breaking out of that mould, Roy takes on the region as a whole, and delivers a radical new interpretation of why the economy of South Asia is changing so fast.