Journal Special Issue
Land and Property Rights

This special issue of the Journal of Development Economics originates from a UNU-WIDER research project on land inequality and decentralized governance in LDCs. The research began in late 2010 with Dilip Mookherjee and Pranab Bardhan jointly directing the project; one of the first project activities was an authors' workshop organised by UNU-WIDER in Hanoi in January 2011 and hosted by the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI), Vietnam. A series of papers were presented at the workshop under the wide umbrella of land reform—including land distribution, property rights, farming, tenure, poverty, and migration. Following the workshop, the Journal of Development Economics launched a call for papers for the special issue. We received 39 submissions in total of the papers followed the journal's standard refereeing process. Of the 11 papers accepted for the special issue, 8 are the result of the UNU-WIDER project.

Table of contents
  1. Evolution of Land Distribution in West Bengal 1967–2004: Role of Land Reform and Demographic Changes
    Pranab K. Bardhan, Michael Luca, Dilip Mookherjee, Francisco J. Pino
    More Working Paper | Evolution of Land Distribution in West Bengal 1967-2004
  2. Are Land Reforms Granting Complete Property Rights Politically Risky?: Electoral Outcomes of Mexico's Certification Program
    Alain de Janvry, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Elisabeth Sadoulet
    More Working Paper | Can a Populist Political Party Bear the Risk of Granting Complete Property Rights?
  3. Trees, Tenure and Conflict: Rubber in Colonial Benin
    James Fenske
    More Working Paper | Trees, Tenure and Conflict
  4. Poverty and Land Redistribution
    Malcolm Keswell, Michael R. Carter
    More Working Paper | Poverty and Land Distribution
  5. Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularization in Africa: Pilot Evidence from Rwanda
    Daniel Ali Ayalew, Klaus W. Deininger, Markus Goldstein
    More Working Paper | Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularization in Africa
  6. Political Connections and Land-Related Investment in Rural Vietnam
    Thomas Markussen, Finn Tarp
    More Working Paper | Political Connections and Investment in Rural Vietnam
  7. Land Acquisition for Industrialization and Compensation of Displaced Farmers
    Maitreesh Ghatak, Dilip Mookherjee
    More Working Paper | Land Acquisition for Industrialization and Compensation of Displaced Farmers
  8. Intergenerational Mobility and Interpersonal Inequality in an African Economy
    Sylvie Lambert, Martin Ravallion, Dominique van de Walle
    More Working Paper | Is It What You Inherited Or What You Learnt?
    More Blog | Extreme poverty - the poorest are being left behind
    More Blog | Five lessons from Martin Ravallion’s WIDER Annual Lecture
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