Access to Land, Rural Poverty, and Public Action

	When should governments intervene in access to land in order to obtain efficiency gains and poverty reduction?
	What rights are necessary for efficiency?
	What forms of tenure improve people's access with efficient use?
	How can land markets be made efficient?
	Are land sales hostile to the poor?
	Can rental markets help the poor? and,
	Is enough known to design effective policy reforms?

The authors conclude that 'both welfare and efficiency gains can be achieved if flexible and low-cost channels to land exist and are usable by the rural poor' (p.7), and the book explores the alternatives for achieving this:

	through inter-family transfers,
	intra-community access,
	land sales and rental markets, and
	various reform designs.

A great deal of work and a number of unanswered questions are dealt with in the 16 subsequent chapters, which alternate between theoretical arguments and case studies.

The more theoretical include discussion of the near-universality of divisible inheritance and the special circumstances that can lead to its blocking, in an interesting comparison between Europe and Africa (J-P. Platteau and J.M. Baland), sources of inefficiency in intra-household land allocation, with particular reference to women (M. Fafchamps), some misunderstandings and unanswered puzzles concerning common pool resources (CPR) and open access resources (E. Ostrom), land rental markets (E. Sadoulet, R. Mugai and A. de Janvry), and an analysis of liberalisation and the agrarian question in Latin America (M.R. Carter and R. Salgado).

Some policy-relevant findings that struck this reader are: a need to strengthen equity in inter-generational transfers, and to answer the question why women's allocations and use of land are separated from those of men in Africa but not in Asia; a clarification of the gains and risks of CPR, and a need to understand the determinants of successful community cooperation; and the finding that land sales markets are hostile to poor people, but rental markets including sharecropping can be beneficial.

In the remaining chapters, case studies and administrative experience are in the forefront, though they are organised as an integral part of the theoretical development of the book. There are resources here in abundance, for arguing old or new policy options. The starting point of the search is unequivocal: the World Bank's rationale (as explained by K. Deininger and H. Binswanger in an analysis of the evolution of Bank understanding and policy since the 1970s) for prioritising individual ownership - as a source of transferable wealth, self-insurance, collateral, status and an opportunity for productive investment. However, the limitations of titling schemes are recognised, along with the difficulty of full-scale reform. Instead, the proposal is to make land sales and rental markets more efficient in the interests of poor people - land reform through the market. A range of measures is proposed, and illustrated, some of them quite specific, some formal and some informal, and it is argued that these need to be implemented in a comprehensive framework of policy and institutional reform.

Whether this new agenda will work - a structural adjustment programme for land tenure? - cannot be conclusively established from the case studies, which demonstrate the need for solutions to be tailored to specific political economies, and the authors are humble about 'huge knowledge gaps in efficiently designing land policy reforms' (p.23). These gaps do not include the many questions that evidently fall outside the book's purview, such as negotiated social significance of land relations, and the questions thrown up by dualistic systems often said to need 'clarifying', for example statutory versus customary tenure in West Africa.

Several pages of algebra may deter non-economist readers, but are testimony to the single-mindedness of this analysis which, however, seems to be more interested in transforming land tenure systems than in understanding or managing them in their evolving complexity. Nevertheless, one suspects that this work will form a key text in advancing the 'post-Washington consensus' in this area.