State-owned forest enterprises (SOFEs) in northeast China and Inner Mongolia play important roles both in timber production and in the maintenance of ecological security. However, since the late 1970s, forest resource and economic crises have seriously restricted these functions.

Land degradation poses a serious problem for the livelihoods of rural producers. Furthermore, there is rarely enough private investment taking place to commensurate the scale of the problem. This article examines the role of tenure insecurity, resource poverty, risk and time preferences, and community-led land conservation on differentiated patterns of household investment in land conservation in northern Ethiopia.

This is a chapter in a book entitled "The Emergence of Land Markets in Africa Impacts on Poverty, Equity, and Efficiency" edited by Stein Holden, Keijiro Otsuka and Frank Place, 2009.

This chapter tries to evaluate whether land rental markets in Ethiopia allow households to attain their desired level of cultivated land irrespective of their endowment using the friction model developed by Rosett (1959) and Skoufias (1995).

This chapter of the book assess the output levels and fertiliser input levels of kin and non-kin sharecropped tenants’ plots, using the sharecropping tenants’ owner-operated land as counterfactual.

Agricultural Investment and Productivity provides a deep and systematic look at the opportunities for and constraints to investments in sustainable agriculture in East Africa, offering important insights into what works and how to analyze agricultural investments in one of the poorest regions of the world.

Aiming to alleviate rural poverty, stimulate investment in forests, and improve forest conservation, the Chinese government set forth a policy leading to small private holdings of previously village administered forest lands.

Climate change has brought issues of deforestation and forest land governance to the forefront. It is now widely accepted that deforestation and must be addressed in order to effectively reduce sociated weak local land use governance is a key driver behind deforestation and degradation and associated forest degradation are responsible for about 17% of total global carbon emissions—with over 70% of these emissions coming from forest burning and clearing in the five forest-rich countries of Indonesia, Brazil, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Initiatives certifying that farms and firms adhere to predefined environmental and social welfare production standards are increasingly popular. According to proponents, they create financial incentives for farms and firms to improve their environmental and socioeconomic performance. This paper reviews the evidence on whether sustainable certification of agricultural commodities and tourism operations actually has such benefits.

A new EfD/RFF Book titled "Land Reforms in Asia and Africa - Impacts on Poverty and Natural Resource Management" is planned for 2012. Editors are Professors Stein Holden and Keijiro Otsuka.

The research project on land reforms is ongoing, and a first book workshop was held on Jan 24-25, 2010, at Peking University.

Using a difference-in-difference approach, this paper assesses the effects on investment of a low-cost land registration program in Ethiopia, which covered some 20 million plots over five years. Despite policy constraints, the program increased land-related investment and yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation.