In Africa, there has been a move towards increased privatization and titling of land. LastarriaCornhiel (1997) has found that privatization of land in many countries has resulted in titles being transferred to male “heads” of households, to powerful groups, or to corporate or other entities and that women have lost rights they once had. Women suffer systematic disadvantages in the market because their opportunities to buy land are limited. In some places, however, small elite groups of professional or wealthy women have gained secure freehold ownership rights in land (Walker 2003).

_Government-initiated land reforms and resettlement schemes._ Although government land redistribution programs provide an opportunity to equalize property rights between men and women, this happens infrequently. In India, Agarwal (2002a: 8) concludes that, “irrespective of the program under which the transfers occur, typically the land is allotted almost exclusively to males, even in communities which traditionally practiced matrilineal inheritance, such as the Garos of northeast India.” In Sri Lanka, Agarwal (1994) reports that in the Mahaweli scheme, 86 percent of the land allocated by the government went to men; of the land granted to women, only two independently managed their land. A counter example is provided by Vietnam, which recently piloted a program to re-title land jointly in the names of both husband and wife (Mason and Carlsson 2004).

A survey of couples in Zimbabwe found that 98 percent of resettlement area permits given for farming and grazing land were held by husbands, with only 2 percent held by wives (Ikdahl et al. 2005). Women lose their rights to stay on the resettlement scheme once they are divorced but there is some indication that they are allowed to remain if widowed. In Ethiopia’s recent land titling process, in contrast, women have been given access to formal land titles. As of October 2004, there were 721,978 registered land holdings. Of these, nearly 30 percent were registered to women, 33 percent to men, and 39 percent were jointly registered. The remaining land was registered as communal or belonging to an NGO or government organization (Teklu 2005).

In Latin America the major land reforms of the 1950 to 1990 period failed to address women’s land rights. The share of female beneficiaries rarely exceeded eleven percent. Hence, as Table 2 shows, of current landowners, men are more likely than women to have received land via state redistribution of land. Although most agrarian reform laws were gender neutral, the legal beneficiaries were household heads, defined culturally as the husband. In the reforms of land legislation in the 1980s and 1990s, this situation began to change, as a number of countries began giving priority to female households heads as a form of affirmative action to make up for past discrimination or requiring that land distributed or titled by the state be adjudicated and/or titled in the name of the couple (see Table 1). As a result, in some countries (Colombia and Nicaragua) the share of women beneficiaries of such efforts resulted in their constituting over one-third of the total beneficiaries (Deere and León 2001).

# **4.  Best Practices in Collecting Data on Assets**

This section reviews the ‘state of the art’ with respect to data collection on assets in recent household surveys. We first discuss data collection on assets at the household level in the Living Standard Measurement Study surveys (LSMS). We then turn to our primary concern, the collection of data on assets at the individual level, reviewing the LSMS as well as other 16