Abstract :
Questions about land markets are central to development policy, as
underlined recently in the 2008 World Development Report (World
Bank 2007: 9). In particular, markets in which land rights are transferred
on a temporary or permanent basis are seen as playing a
key role in the redistribution of land to more efficient users, thus
increasing productivity and employment. In this view, any negative
effects attributed to land markets, notably in terms of inequity and
landlessness, result from failures in other markets, especially credit
and insurance markets (Deininger and Feder 2001; de Janvry et al.
2001; World Bank 2003). In Africa, until late in the twentieth century
it was these negative effects, and a perception of land as being
relatively abundant due to low population densities in many parts
of the continent, that influenced policy makers’ views. Consequently,
land markets received relatively little attention in development policy,
except, as exemplified in an earlier issue of this journal (Shipton and
Goheen 1992), as a means of securing credit flows for agricultural
development. Over the past two decades, however, a wave of proposals
for land tenure reform in many African countries (Toulmin and Quan
2000; Berry 2002; World Bank 2003) has raised questions about land
markets as a means of allocating land that have profound political
and economic implications, rarely addressed by previous research. This
collection of articles provides an opportunity to explore the nature of
land markets in Africa.
