Leasehold estate

About: Leasehold estate is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1589 publications have been published within this topic receiving 21480 citations. The topic is also known as: leasehold & tenancy.

Landownership in Britain and the Quest for Town Planning

Abstract: In this paper I endeavour to show that town planning in Britain, although placed within the ‘public domain’, is largely operating in accordance with the principles of private law. I also argue that town planning is an integral part of the land and property market which itself is conditioned by the definition of the rights in land and property. These rights are shown to be grounded in the traditions of the private land law as evolved over centuries from the feudal system of land and property relations. I therefore begin with an examination of development under the leasehold system in London during the 18th and 19th centuries and find that landowners, in their efforts of maintaining the value of their estate, conducted a form of environmental control very similar to what planners do nowadays as part of their activities in development control. It is then shown how the old system was unable to cope with the pressures of industrialisation and rapidly expanding urban areas. Politicians, royal commissions, and e...

Debt and Its Social Entrapments

Abstract: Between 1997 and 2012, nearly two hundred thousand agriculturists committed suicide in India.1 Most official reports, studies, and testimonials considered indebtedness and the burdens of debt defaulting to be the key reasons for such distress.2 Yet indebtedness is not just an economic factor but also a social condition that marks the life-worlds of victims and their families. Debt, as part of the capitalization of agriculture and rural economies, is a signal aspect of the circuits of capital and is promoted as an inevitable process of economic growth and productivity. Even as debt forges new relationships between creditors and debtors, it generates a cultural grammar in which "repayment," "interest," "mortgage," "deferment," "reclaim," "seizure," and so on become part of the lexicon of the everyday life of debtors. In the telling words of Margaret Atwood, debt as a "human construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear" (2008,2). And in the life-worlds of marginal agriculturists, whose already tenuous economic position is made more vulnerable by debt, the entrapments of indebtedness become the final straw that destroys their very reason for living.The increasing integration of agriculturists into the market economy has led to reordering the cultural basis of Indian agriculture.3 Although it is well known and an established fact that the agrarian system has long been hierarchical, with caste-based allocation of rights over land and its resources, regional agricultural practices were conducted on a pattern of collectively shared knowledge forms and rhythms. Such agricultural patterns were also marked by shared agricultural knowledge and linked to local cultural patterns.4 Regional or agro-ecology-specific agriculture was based on a society-nature relationship in which society relied on a corpus of collective knowledge to appropriate nature within a range of hierarchical social and economic structures and relationships. While the structure of social activities was itself linked to the ecological and agricultural cycles, the key idioms and terms of cultural life were drawn from and linked to agricultural activities.5 Even as agriculture was based on differential rights and status, it provided a larger collective identity to a range of people who performed different functions in its processes. In addition, as studies (Amin 1982; Breman 2007) have elaborated, agriculture in India drew on a network of relationships in which cooperation and extension of assistance for a range of activities formed part of the production processes themselves.But the changes induced by the capitalization of agriculture and the retained caste-based social bases of production have altered this collective orientation and exacerbated the multiple risks that most agriculturists face.6 This is particularly so for marginal agriculturists whose precarious economic position is worsened by the risks of the new capitalist order. As marginal cultivators, their position in the local and macro economy is one of marginality, not merely from their ownership or cultivation of limited plots and sizes of land (with an average of only 1.33 hectares per cultivating household) but also from the marginal political and social position they occupy in the immediate and larger political economies of the nation. What Sanyal (2007) and Akhram-Lodhi and Kay (2009) identify as markers of marginality is valid for all the households that experienced suicides. These markers include not only access to or ownership of limited landholding, but marginal cultivators also suffer from insecurity of ownership and tenancy, produce for both consumption and sale, are structurally situated in conditions where the surplus production is often transferred to dominant classes, and are subject to processes of semi-proletarianization and pauperization. Additionally, most marginal cultivators are also from the lower-ranked jatis and hence lack the social and cultural capital to emerge as successful or entrepreneurial agriculturists. …

A Review of Institutional Alternatives to Collateralized Lending

Abstract: Rural producers’ access to formal finance has often been limited by their inability to provide collaterals, particularly in the form of registered or certified land titles and tenancy contracts or assets which are auctionable as well as by laws that make foreclosure difficult. This paper reviews some of the alternative institutional arrangements (possibilities) for reducing and overcoming collateral requirements such as third party guarantees, ownership of tradeable assets, credit guarantee schemes, group lending, credit-savings linkages, incremental and loan repayment-dependent lending, portfolio diversification and an efficient legal system for contract enforcement. It also specifies the land policy and tenure reforms that are desirable, especially in the direction of formal land titling or legally specified rights to the use and ownership of lands, the consolidation of land holdings and the provision of proper cadastres for land and assuring that titles are secure.

Risk aversion as effort incentive: a correction and prima facie test of the moral hazard theory of share tenancy

Abstract: We show that Stiglitz's (1974) principal-agency theory of share tenancy does not imply, as alleged, that the optimal tenant share is less than one for risk-averse tenants nor that the share decreases monotonically with tenant risk aversion. Tenants may self insure by working harder increasingly so for higher levels of risk aversion with the result that the more risk averse work for higher shares. When the model is parameterized based on previous studies of Philippine agriculture, it predicts a U-shaped relationship between optimal tenant''s share and risk aversion. Landlords choose rent contracts for both high and low levels of risk aversion and shares from 80-99% for intermediate levels. In contrast, actual shares in the study area ranged from 50-60%, with most farmers contracted on a 50:50 basis. We conclude that rent contracts must have additional disadvantages and/or share tenancy additional benefits that are not accounted for in the static principal-agency theory.

Poverty Alleviation through Forest Resource Management: An Analysis of Leasehold Forestry Practice in Nepal

Abstract: of the Research Project Natural resources are the key assets on which the poor build their livelihoods. In the absence of appropriate institutional mechanism poverty and natural resource become interlinked in a manner with one exacerbating the other. In this regards, appropriate property right regimes are considered vital both for addressing the problem of resource degradation and alleviation of absolute poverty. Based on this conceptual framework the Leasehold Forestry (LHF) for the poor has been practiced in Nepal for a decade.