Land reform, after a long period of being considered irrelevant or passé, has now emerged into the media and political limelight. To some extent, this is due to the well-publicised land invasions in Zimbabwe. However, the Brazilian MST's mobilizations in the 1990s have attracted attention and land invasions have also occurred in South Africa in the recent period (Merten and wa ka Ngobeni, 2001;...

This paper provides an overview of land reform in South Africa since the advent of democratic government in 1994, with a particular emphasis on land redistribution. It begins with a brief sketch of the historical background before outlining the main aspects and achievements of the land reform programme to date. The final sections of the paper briefly discuss some new policy proposals and the ke...

In the 1980s, the Thai government tried to legalize squatters living in certain geographical areas by issuing special titles that allowed for cultivation but restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997 and a differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we compare the differential rental rates between secured and unsecured plots in ref...

Land reforms in developing countries provide a good experiment for study on development economics, and in the case Taiwan the land reform provides specific historical context for us to closely examine the relationship between redistribution and growth. In this paper, we use panel data on the fifteen counties of Taiwan around 1950s and 1960s to empirically evaluate whether redistributive land re...

The law can sometimes be glacial in its evolution, moving ever so slowly through fine points of interpretation by judges and equally careful (if not ponderous) processes of legislative reform. Only when an observer stands back and looks at a particular area of jurisprudence over a period of a few decades can the movement be clearly detected. In other instances, the law can seem to be like an ea...

The question of land in Zimbabwe has always been political and gendered. Whereas land reform was necessary in the context of highly unequal land ownership patterns and poverty, this paper shows that the Fast Track Land Reform Programme diminished opportunities or spaces for women to be empowered and shrunk the democratic spaces for genuine participation of women in the development process by de...

We use data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment by some 500,000 individuals in 200 West Bengal villages to explore gender-differentiated impacts of land reform on human capital accumulation at the individual level. While there are significant gains (of about 0.3 years for males) in the immediate post-reform generation, their magnitude pales in comparison to second-generation e...

Land reform – the reallocation of rights to establish a more equitable distribution of farmland – can be a powerful strategy for promoting both economic development and environmental quality. This paper surveys land reform strategies, illustrated by the postwar reforms in East Asia and the ‘bottom-up’ land reform today being led by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement. Land reform can reduce rur...

This paper investigates the impacts of Communal Property Associations on rural livelihoods in the Northern Province, South Africa. After a brief review of livelihoods and a short background to land reform in South Africa the paper details findings regarding the impact of land reform in the province. Quantitative and qualitative interviews were conducted from July 1999 until May 2000 and in Janu...