Note on land reform in Bangladesh: The efficacy of ceilings

In this note, new data concerning the agrarian structure of Bangladesh are employed to test the efficacy of ceilings on the size of landholdings as a means of making land available to the landless and the near landless. The data confirm that the numbers of potential claimants for land far exceeds the potential supply, even if ceilings on holdings were lowered from 100 standard bighas (331/3 acres) to 25 standard bighas (81/3 acres).     

The Arab‐Israeli peace process: A house built on sand?

While the Declaration of Principles agreed between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993 was widely welcomed as the major breakthrough in the seemingly intractable Arab‐Israeli conflict, progress proved to be difficult, uncertain and, at times, bloody. This article places the agreement in the context of previous peace endeavours in an attempt to explain why the apparent early promise proved so difficult to sustain.     

Approaches to the Politics of Systemic Economic Reform in the Soviet Union

Political support for economic reform in the USSR is evaluated at five different levels of Soviet society, or more properly, of the political-administrative hierarchy: the top leader (Gorbachev himself), the collective leadership (Politburo), the bureaucracy, knowledge specialists (intelligentsia), and the population at large. Attitudes and motivations within each group are examined in order to demonstrate how interest group relations in the Soviet Union have made and will continue to make basic economic change a protracted, complex, and unpredictable process. journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 113.