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.

The economics of tenancy in early twentieth-century southern Italy

Abstract: Minister at the time, drew Parliament's attention to the severity of problems in the area and thus to the need to ensure that the members of the commission were 'persons who enjoyed the fullest confidence of Parliament . . . and of the entire country'.3 It is thus not surprising that the final report of the commission, contained in I2 volumes, provides the most comprehensive, detailed, and accurate portrait available of farming in southern Italy before the First World War. One of the most striking features of this report, and the one with which we are concerned in this article, is its account of southern tenure systems. In sharp contrast to the traditional picture of the south as a land dominated for the most part by large estates worked by wage labour, the commissioners discovered contractual arrangements of much greater variety and intricacy. Our task in this article is first to describe in some detail the tenurial arrangements reported by the commissioners and, second, to demonstrate that there are sound economic reasons for believing that the commissioners' portrait, not the traditional one, is the more authentic. In a nutshell, we argue that complex tenancy relationships in the south represented quite rational responses by landlords and tenants to the problems of high income variance, incomplete or nonexistent credit and insurance markets, and supervision-intensive cash crops (that is, output that was extremely sensitive to the quality of labour inputs). Tenure systems thus constituted attempts by farmers to resolve the difficulties

The Pricing of the Emergent Leasehold (Possessory) Estates of Ghana

Abstract: The paper develops hedonic analyses of the pricing of leasehold versus freehold estates in Ghana. The motivation of the paper is the passage of Act 267(5) in 1992 that effectively abolished outright sale of stool lands in Ghana. Stool lands are lands controlled by tribal “chiefs.” Act 267(5) prohibits the sale of freehold estates for stool lands. There are two important findings in this study. The first is that freeholds tend to attract premium prices relative to leaseholds. This supports the bundle-of-rights argument. The second is that the effect of the 1992 Act is indeed capitalized into land prices because of the relative increase in the supply of leaseholds vis-a-vis freeholds. Specifically, the price of freeholds increased relative to the price of leaseholds after the constitutional event. The study also finds that transactions involving stools and individuals, usually perceived to be associated with litigation risk (or title insecurity) relative to government lands, are sold at a discount. Transactions noted to have a history of litigation are also associated with price discounts. The estimated coefficients on all the variables representing services to the site like water, electricity and access roads are significantly positive, indicating a high demand for such essential services.

Land beneficiaries as game farmers: conservation, land reform and the invention of the ‘community game farm’ in KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract: Scholarship on post-apartheid land reform includes research on land claims made to formal protected areas, such as national parks and state game reserves. Little attention has however, been paid to the question of land restitution claims on private lands, on which a range of nominally ‘conservation-friendly’ land-uses (including commercial hunting) have taken place. This article traces the emergence of the ‘community game farm’ as a product of land reform processes affecting freehold land in the midlands of KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. Two groups of land beneficiaries who were granted title to former privately owned game farms used for leisure hunting are studied in detail. The article shows that a range of state and private actors, as well as traditional authorities, have worked to ensure the continuation of the land under conservation or game farming after transfer. The central argument is that in this process, a generic narrative is imposed which works to conflate or deny the distinct...