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.

Incomplete contracts and investment : a study of land tenancy in Pakistan

Abstract: When contracts are incomplete, relationship-specific investments may be underprovided due to the threat of opportunistic expropriation or holdup. The authors find evidence of such underinvestment on tenanted land in rural Pakistan. Using data from households cultivating multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, they show that land-specific investment is lower on leased plots. This result is robust to the possible effects of asymmetric information in the leasing market. Greater tenure security also increases land-specific investment on leased plots. Moreover, variation in tenure security appears to be driven largely by heterogeneity across landlords, suggesting that reputation may be important in mitigating the holdup problem.

Epilogue of a Short-Lived Land Rush: Private, Rural, and Urban Land Tenure in South Sudan

Abstract: This article investigates three forms of land tenure in South Sudan: investor leasehold, rural customary, and urban freehold. South Sudan’s experience with large-scale foreign investments in land mirrors that of the global land rush. A surge of investments from 2007 to 2013 has since tapered off to the point that there are only 17 land deals marked as “concluded” in the Land Matrix. This rapid, albeit brief, land rush demonstrated the pitfalls associated with large-scale land investments in the context of weak and contested governance institutions. Since the breakout of civil war in December 2013, the land question in South Sudan has been defined by government attempts to title land in urban areas and to formalize customary land systems in rural areas. These two processes have been highly contested on account of population movements and shifting power relations amid the civil war. Ensuing conflicts are often framed as ethnic in nature. From a political economy standpoint, however, these conflicts are the outcome of the expansion of market forces in urban areas and the codification of land tenure practices in rural areas, which subsequently exacerbates intergroup tensions.

Magnitude, structure and determinants of tenancy in rural India - a state level analysis.

Abstract: The institution of tenancy has remained one of the most debated rural institutions since the days of Adam Smith. The classical economists debated the relative efficiency of different tenurial systems, namely, fixed rent tenancy and share tenancy (metayage as it was called in French following a 50-50 sharing). The proposition that share tenancy is an inferior contractual arrangement is clearly stated in Alfred Marshal’s Principles (1920); it is quite often referred to as Marshallian inefficiency or tax equivalent approach to share tenancy. In more recent times, the theoretical debate has branched into two schools. While one school supports the Marshallian inefficiency proposition, the other has sought to demonstrate that resource allocation must be efficient regardless of tenurial contracts (Cheung, 1969; Otsuka and Hayami, 1988 and Otsuka et al., 1992). In a somewhat related debate, marxists consider tenancy in general, and share tenancy in particular, as a source of exploitation and surplus appropriation, whereas the neo-classicals explain its emergence and persistence in terms of imperfect rural markets characterised by moral hazards, information asymmetry, high transaction costs, etc. (Stiglitz, 1989; Braverman and Stiglitz, 1982; Ray, 1998; Pearce, 1983; Bharadwaj and Das, 1975; Prasad, 1973; Bhadhuri, 1973). In the Indian context, a number of empirical studies, based on sample surveys, have looked into various aspects of tenancy relations like magnitude, type, relative efficiency of different land tenure systems, and so on. The studies pertaining to eastern Indian states, especially of the earlier vintage, have, inter alia, shown that tenancy, in particular share tenancy, in conjunction with the exploitative interlinkages in credit and labour markets act as a formidable barrier in the introduction of new agricultural technology (Bhadhuri, 1973; Prasad, 1973; Bharadwaj and Das, 1975). More recent studies for these states have, however, reported qualitative changes in diverse aspects of tenancy relations (Chadha and Bhaumik, 1992; Swain, 1999; Jha, 2004; Chattopadhyay and Sengupta, 2001; Sharma et al., 1995). In a similar vein, studies in other states, especially in agriculturally developed states like