Land tenure and land reform: past and present

This article looks at land reform in history and compares it to the present. The primary concern is the relationship between land tenure and economic development, and land reform and the distribution of income, wealth and power. The main finding—that dispersed ownership and management correlate with economic development—is unsurprising. But it is more difficult to assess how conditions which are conducive to maximal production come about, or how a society shifts from concentrated power over land and labour to a dispersed tenure system.     

Land, landlords and sustainable livelihoods: The impact of agrarian reform on a coconut hacienda in the Philippines

Agrarian reform has been a key theme on the development agenda of many countries in the Global South for decades. Whilst such interventions are often pursued for political goals and in the interests of empowerment, there is often a mismatch between these goals and the actual outcomes achieved. Within this context, this study investigates the impacts of agrarian reform in Del Rosario, a former coconut hacienda in the Philippines. This is done in an attempt to explore whether agrarian reform has facilitated the creation of sustainable livelihoods among its beneficiaries, in particular, and in their agrarian reform community, in general. The impacts of reform are examined in relation to four themes - economic, social, demographic and environmental. Overall, the study concludes that agrarian reform has not brought about sustainable livelihoods in the former coconut hacienda. People's livelihoods, especially those derived from copra farming, remain at a subsistence level. At most, at an economic level agrarian reform has brought about improved access to land among its beneficiaries. Nevertheless, it has empowered the farmers by giving them greater freedom and has increased their sense of well-being, as well as enabling them to improve their families’ life prospects and strengthen social capital.     

Cap reform: modelling supply response subject to the land set-aside

This paper uses duality theory to develop a model of European Community agriculture. The model is used to investigate the impact of the land set-aside provision of the recent package of reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy. We assume that producers chose output and variable input levels that maximize difference between revenue and variable cost. By including first-order conditions for the allocation of land across its uses, we impose that the observed allocations are profit-maximizing allocations. To overcome the problem of incorporating many outputs into an estimable production structure, we imposed a priori the restriction that the technology was weakly separable in major categories of outputs. With this restriction, it was possible to model production decisions in stages using consistent aggregates in the latter stages.     

土地利用与国土规划空间优化:促节约·守红线·惠民生

文章围绕国家"十二五"规划重点战略部署,按照实现新时期国土规划独创性和有用性的基本工作要求,以土地用途管制为基本平台,构建了国土发展空间类型体系这一全新空间组织理念.将土地资源配置规模、节约集约用地效益、耕地和生态空间保护与国土开发、利用、保护和整治等重大问题进行结合,提出了土地利用与国土空间优化的新思路.     

Land degradation: links to agricultural output and profitability

To understand land degradation and assess policy responses, knowledge is needed of the bio-physical causes, the economic effects on farms and the incentives farmers face to avoid or ameliorate the degradation. An empirical study of land degradation in the Australian state of New South Wales is presented in this article. The results suggest that there are incentives for farmers to co-exist with certain forms of degradation, while there are also incentives to avoid some other forms.     

Limits to policy: Land use control in the USA

This article uses two different approaches to examine both the relationship between land and the law and the limits to policy for land use in the US. The first approach considers ways to circumvent the status of rights in land, and looks at their basis in traditional social attitudes and assumptions —factors no longer supported by scientific knowledge and changing concepts of public interest. The second concerns the feasibility of general laws to reflect changing perceptions of rights over land through declarations of national policy. Each approach reveals complexities that pose great difficulties to any effort to achieve a legally defined set of principles for land use that would reinforce a basic stewardship ethic for the land throughout the US.     

Risk Behaviours and Grazing Land Management: A Framed Field Experiment and Linkages to Range Land Condition

We use a framed field experiment considering hypothetical stocking rate decisions made by grazing enterprise managers and estimate non‐linear multinomial logit models for a range of nested non‐expected utility and expected utility models. The risk and decision‐bias parameters for five models estimated for individual responses are shown to be significantly related to land condition but in ways which suggest behavioural aspects of decision making are critical in understanding land management and stocking rate decisions. Our results show that individual heterogeneity in decision making amongst farming groups is likely to be a significant source of variation in farming intensity and technology adoption decisions. This heterogeneity does not appear to be a reflection of socio‐demographic characteristics. Furthermore, decision functions appear to be biased toward selection of simpler representative functions (e.g. Expected Utility) for sample averages. This suggests that experimental findings that Expected Utility is representative for actual decisions may be due to sample averaging rather than reflect actual behaviour.     

西方农地法的特点及启示

西方农地管理有着丰富的经验和有力的法律基础.本文立足于我国实行最严格的土地管理制度,在系统总结西方,尤其是欧洲农地法特点的基础上,采用比较分析的方法,对我国土地资源管理法律建设的重点问题进行了探索.研究表明,政府对农地最终处置权的享有、区域规划的突出地位、农地转让及农场规模的控制以及可持续发展思想的充分体现是西方农地法的主要特点.这些特点给了我们以下一些启示:①应加强区域规划和土地利用规划相互关系的研究;②积极探索农地管理的市场机制及其实现形式;③重视我国农地取得方式问题和农地细碎化现象;④及时将农地保护以数量保护为主转变为农地的数量、质量和生态环境保护并重的三维保护体系.     

The Quest to Bring Land under Social and Political Control: Land Reform Struggles of the Past and Present in Ecuador

Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, the paper characterizes these struggles as the attempt to increase the social and political control of land in the face of mounting commodification. The movement started in the 1960s and remains evident in Ecuador today. Exploring land reform in Ecuador from this theoretical perspective provides new insight into land struggles in the country and contributes to debates over land reforms of the past and present elsewhere in the Global South.     

Women's Land Rights and the Trap of Neo-Conservatism: A Response to Jackson

In response to Cecile Jackson's article, I argue here that Jackson has seriously misrepresented my work, often attributing to me the opposite of what I have said, and turned nuanced and balanced formulations into one-sided extremes. I seek to correct the important misrepresentations, as well as outline my substantive differences with Jackson. In particular, her argument that women should not claim family land for risk of destabilizing family relations could, by extension, have deeply conservative implications for all forms of women's struggles to enhance their freedoms and capabilities. In many South Asian communities, conflict is equally inherent in women choosing their own marriage partners or professions, or seeking gender-equal education, or wanting freedom of reproductive choice or free public interaction. The fear of family conflict could tie women down on numerous such counts as well. Jackson also overextends the resistance to women's claims in family land by treating South Asia as a uniform entity. The analysis in my book on this subject shows a substantial regional variability in kinship structures and social norms, which would make for much less resistance in southern South Asia than in the north, providing promising initial avenues for extending women's land claims. Also, unlike Jackson, I do not locate the process of women acquiring land rights in each woman's isolated struggle within the family, but in a collective struggle that seeks to build support across multiple tiers of society.     

Transition to the market in agriculture in Ukraine: Priority areas for reform

Abstract

There are a number of key characteristics of Ukrainian agriculture which are central to the discussion of the reform process. These include the predominance of state ownership and control, lack of commercial management skills, uneven commitment to reform in a decentralized system of responsibility, monopoly, a low level of technology and limited access to resources that facilitate efficient operation of the market. Necessary restructuring will involve three categories of measures including the establishment of a competitive environment, augmenting enterprise response, and macroeconomic stabilization. At present reform has proceeded extremely slowly and speeding the process appears to require Western aid, both financial and technical, to provide a demonstration of the benefits of reform in order to stimulate its more rapid uptake.     

农地承包权配置对土地利用的影响——来自苏赣农村的经验

处于社会经济转型期的中国,政府和市场都对农地承包权的配置起着重要作用,因此,通过优化农地承包权的配置来提高土地利用效率并不能顾此失彼。究竟什么样的农地承包权配置结果有利于农地利用效率的优化?本文在探讨农地承包权农户间配置的村庄差异和个体差异对农地利用效率影响的作用机理基础上,结合对苏赣农村的实证分析得知:就一个村庄集体而言,农地承包权的过度均等配置并不利于农地利用效率的提高。而将农地承包权配置给决策者经验丰富、文化素质较高的农户家庭,整体受教育程度较高、年轻的农户家庭,以及非农参与率较低的农户家庭等都能在不同程度上有利于农地利用效率的提高。     

Irreversible Investment Under Uncertainty: Conservation Easements and the Option to Develop Agricultural Land

A landowner's decision to convert farmland to urban use is presented as an irreversible investment under uncertainty. This approach improves on conventional approaches to the valuation of conservation easements by incorporating option values. This approach also refines the calculation of compensation potentially due to landowners when use of their land is restricted by government policies to protect the environment.     

农地入市与土地一级市场均衡:一个理论模型

在城市中的国有产权土地消耗殆尽的状态下,中国工业化和城市化的持续发展就维系在农村集体产权的建设用地上,城市的扩张和工业的发展使得盘活集体建设用地势在必行。同时,农村集体土地流转后存在着巨大的增值空间。本文基于供需原理,从土地市场演进的角度分析了农村集体建设用地进入市场后对国家垄断的土地一级市场的影响,旨在为农地的入市提供理论依据和政策参考。