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.