Redistributing land rights is a tricky subject and one that easily becomes controversial as recent experience has shown. This new book calmly examines the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of land redistribution.

Land reforms are laws that are intended, and likely, to cut poverty by raising the poor’s share of land rights. That raises questions about property rights as old as moral philosophy, and issues of efficiency and fairness that dominate policy from Bolivia to Nepal. Classic reforms directly transfer land from rich to poor. However, much else has been marketed as land reform: the restriction of tenancy, but also its de-restriction; collectivisation, but also de-collectivisation; land consolidation, but also land division. In 1955-2000, genuine land reform affected over a billion people, and almost as many hectares. Is land reform still alive, for example in Bolivia, South Africa and Nepal? Or is it dead and, if so, is this because it has succeeded, or because it has failed? There has been massive research on land reform and this book builds on some surprising findings. Small farms’ share in land is rising in most of Asia and Africa. This is not driven (as widely claimed) by growth in rural population or farm productivity, but by the relative efficiency of small farms, and in some cases by land reform. Whether land reform helps the poor depends not only on land transfers, but at least as much on its effects through employment, non-farm activity, GDP growth and distribution, as well as the village status and power of the poor. Avoidance, evasion and even distortion of land reform laws sometimes advance their main aims. Liberalisation and its accompaniments (such as supermarkets) can be powerful friends or fatal foes of small farms and land reform. This book will be of great interest to students, researchers and consultants working on agriculture, farm organisation, rural development and poverty reduction, with special emphasis on developing countries.

Land reform became an international issue in the aftermath of World War II, when the United States planned to dispossess the Junker in Prussia and actually participated in major land redistribution programs in Japan, the Republic of China, and Korea. It became a canon of United States foreign policy in the Philippines, Thailand, and Iran, as

Interdisciplinary research study of the theoretics and agricultural policies in respect of land reform and land tenure systems, particularly in developing countries - includes trends in agricultural development and economic development, and covers agricultural planning, income redistribution, rural area interest groups, rural cooperatives, employment opportunity in the agricultural sector, etc. Bibliography pp. 149 to 157 and statistical tables.

This study is an attempt to contribute to our understanding of one of the most important reforms currently advocated by development economists to reduce rural poverty in developing countries: land reform. Dr. Cohen has based his study on models in which three social groups are acting: these, for brevity's sake, are called land lords, peasants and the groups who comprise the non-agricultural sector. Peasants include the so-called landless peasants which western countries generally term agrarian workers. The method can be extended to larger numbers of groups. The actors are involved in various activities, including production, consumption and saving, the latter being available either for physical or for financial invest ment. This implies that various wealth components appear in the model alongside flows of goods and services. Use is made of determinate models with linear and non-linear equations of a dynamic character. The models are employed to estimate socio-economic development under alternative regimes. Regimes differ, on the one hand, according to which group is in power and, on the other hand, according to the instruments of economic policy they use. It is an attractive feature of Dr. Cohen's study that the models are applied to two countries for which all the necessary statistical material has been estimated: India and Chile. For both countries a brief socio-political sketch precedes the numerical application of the models. For India five instruments of socio-economic policy are considered: land transfers, measures to stimulate productivity, credit policies, taxes and tenure and wage regulations.

"Land Law Reform examines the wide-spread efforts to reform land law in developing countries and countries in transition, drawing in particular upon the experience of the World Bank and the Rural Development Institute. The book considers the role of land law reform in the development process and analyzes how the World Bank has sought to support these legal changes in client countries. It reviews the experience with reform of laws affecting land access and rights in achieving gender equity, identifies opportunities for reinforcing environmentally sustainable development through land law reform, and examines from both growth and poverty alleviation perspectives the effectiveness of reforms to formalize property rights and liberalize land markets. The concluding chapter recommends some basic priorities for land law reforms. John W. Bruce is a senior counsel in the Legal Vice-Presidency of the World Bank, and a former director of the Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published extensively on land law and land policy in developing countries. Renee Giovarelli, David Bledsoe, Leonard Rolfes, and Robert Mitchell are staff attorneys with the Rural Development Institute of Seattle, Washington, a nonprofit organization that promotes and advises on land-related policy and legal reform in developing and transition countries. All have done fieldwork and advised extensively on land law reform and have published widely on this topic."