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.

Payment for environmental services, rural poverty reduction and agricultural land conservation in Oyo state farm settlements, Nigeria

Abstract: Despite successive anti-poverty and environmental resources conservation programs by the Nigerian government, the problems of poverty and environmental resources degradation still persist. This study argues that since the two problems are interrelated, the solutions to them must be undertaken simultaneously and in an integrated manner rather than independently of each other. However, one major obstacle to the solution is property rights (i.e. Secured land ownership rights). Past studies argued that without property rights the poor would not be willing to participate in the environmental resources conservation. Besides, studies have indicated that most of the anti-poverty benefits do not reach the target group. Hence, it is inevitably necessary for this study to first of all identify the ‘real poor’ and the categories of the poor multidimensionally. This was achieved with the aid of Alkire and Foster (2010) and Alkire and Santos (2011) multidimensional poverty assessment methods. The study argues that a credit-based Payment for Environmental Services (PES) has the potential to tackle rural poverty and agricultural land degradation simultaneously, without the poor having absolute ownership rights of the agricultural land. To this end a choice experiment approach was employed to design the multi-attributes of PES. Thus, the perspectives of the poor and their preferences for the options of the PES attributes on rural poverty reduction and agricultural land conservation were identified. Multistage sampling technique was used to choose 317 respondents in Akufo, Ijaye and Ilora farm settlements. The main findings of this study revealed that tenancy security of the land is sufficient to attract the poor to participate in land conservation programs. The study also discovered that PES is a viable mechanism for rural poverty reduction and agricultural land conservation. Thus, there is a need for an institutional arrangement for adequate tenancy security provision as this arrangement will enhance the potentials of PES to mitigate both land degradation and rural poverty concomitantly.

An Economic Justification for Land Reformism

Abstract: The pervasive interests in land-tenure-reform policy in the Western world can be traced back to two distinct sources. One is liberal philosophy based on the principle of equality. Family farms owned and operated by the cultivator have long been accepted in the United States as a sound foundation of social and political stability. Following World War II, many landreform programs initiated with the assistance of the United States appear to have been conceived in the same (equalitarian) frame of reference. The second source derives its logical conclusion from the theory of the firm, which shows that, under fixed rent or owner cultivation, the tiller receives the entire incremental product, while under share tenancy he receives only a fraction. Consequently share tenancy would discourage desirable land improvements and encourage inefficient methods of production. Taken together, these two views produce a remarkable doctrinal unity in favor of owner-operated over share-tenancy agricultural units, a view overwhelmingly subscribed to by economists. Recently, the doctrine has been questioned for two reasons. The first stems from the need for an optimum size of farm unit. It is argued that, at least in the densely populated areas of Asia and the Far East, the policy of owner-operated farms would make farm size so small as to reduce the output of land (to say nothing for the moment of the relative adequacy of the level of subsistence or household-income-generation capacity). Thus not only the owner of productive resources has a stake in attempting to achieve an optimum-size unit but also society. The second criticism is chiefly based on theoretical grounds. It is argued that the landlord, being a maximizer, will contract with his tenants on rent, the size of the parcel, and labor inputs so as to maximize his rent

Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871

Abstract: The free holding pioneer is a powerful image in settlement history - "Tenants in Time" tells a different story. Tenancy, though relegated to the periphery by the liberal idealization of ownership, was a common and vital part of the Canadian economy and society. Against a background of international land agitation and using an inter-disciplinary approach, Catharine Wilson looks at life as a tenant farmer, providing new insights into family strategies, land markets, and the growth of liberalism. Using evidence from across Upper Canada she shows how tenancy transformed the landscape and tied old and new settlers together in a continuum of mutual dependence that was essential to settlement, capital creation, and social mobility. Her analysis of customary rights reveals a landlord-tenant relationship - and a concept of ownership - more complex and flexible than previously understood. Landlords, from ordinary farmers to absentee aristocrats, are also part of the story and the much-criticized clergy reserves take a positive role. An intimate exploration of Cramahe Township follows tenants over the generations as they supported their families and combined liberal ideas with household-centered ways. From aggregate statistics to individual human dramas, "Tenants in Time" unravels the life of the tenant farmer in a wonderfully documented, engaging, and compelling argument.

Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the American Revolution

Abstract: Two tenant revolts waged during the Revolutionary War reveal the fragility of the movement in Virginia and New York. In late 1775, James Cleveland tried to convince tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, to join him in a rent strike designed to compel landlords to give tenants better terms. Shortly after initiating the strike, Cleveland began encouraging people to stop paying any bills they owed, including a tax that Virginia's Revolutionary leaders had recently foisted on poorer rural Virginians. Within two years, in the spring of 1777, insurgent tenants in New York's northern Hudson Valley designed an armed uprising to coincide with a rumored invasion of the region by the British army. The insurgencies indicate that Revolutionaries had to fight the war for home rule and the battle to rule at home simultaneously, a prospect that badly frightened men such as Lund Washington, who administered his cousin George Washington's land, and Robert Livingston, Jr., who owned the estate, Livingston Manor, on which most of the New York insurgents lived. Under such stress, Washington and Livingston reached the same conclusions: They hoped somewhat desperately that all their opponents would be "hang'd."1These tenant revolts expose ambiguities inherent in the move toward independence in two states critical to success in the war against Britain. Tobacco produced in Virginia fueled part of the economy of the British Empire, and grain grown and shipped from New York, and increasingly Virginia, fed people who produced cash crops throughout Britain's Atlantic colonies. Warfare, however, inhibited production and trade because men left the fields to fight, or to avoid fighting, and both armies closed off trade routes. Ravaging soldiers also took what food and supplies they needed; sometimes they promised to pay and other times they simply took what they wanted. While both regions were plagued by these similar wartime ills, support for the Revolution differed dramatically. New Yorkers famously, or notoriously, divided over the Revolution, and Virginians have been portrayed as solidly in favor of independence. More recent analysis of each region suggests more complicated divisions, and a study of tenant revolts in both provides an opportunity to offer broader analysis of colonists as they calculated their chances of winning independence and preserving their property, power, and order.When looked at together, tenant revolts in Virginia and New York raise important questions about how white rural inhabitants, especially land tenants, participated in and interpreted the American Revolution. What grievances, for example, did tenants in different parts of the country hope to redress during the Revolution? How did they intend to achieve their goals? How did Revolutionary landlords address those grievances and tactics? While historians have asked some of these questions about tenants in individual states or regions, few have examined them in broader perspective. This essay begins that process by investigating the actions of tenants in New York and Virginia during the Revolutionary War to uncover their grievances, analyze their relationship with the British army, explain how landlords and Revolutionaries reacted, and measure their levels of success.2Historians of the American Revolution who focus on rural inhabitants have generally focused on freeholders, those farmers who owned land, often basing their analysis on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers who linked a yeoman ideal with the republican political structure that emerged in the Revolutionary era. Thomas Jefferson famously extolled the virtues of farmers, while others championed yeomen farmers as the personification of the republican politics espoused by Revolutionaries. They began the Revolutionary period lauding farmers who owned the land they occupied and improved, and by the end were insisting that honest political participation depended on land ownership. The author of the 1775 tract American Husbandry, for example, admired how formers from New England to the Carolmas took up "land whenever they are able to settle it" to become so self-sufficient that market "consumption is scarce worth mentioning. …