To help inform the current debate on the role of land as an instrument for poverty reduction, we analyze the conditions under which access to land reduces poverty in Mexican rural communities. Semi-parametric regression results show that access to even a small plot of land can raise household welfare significantly. For smallholders, an additional hectare of land increases welfare on average by 1.3 times the earnings of an agricultural worker. In addition, the marginal welfare value of land depends importantly on a household’s control over complementary assets such as education and on the context where assets are used such as road access.

Digital technologies are sufficiently disruptive to current ways of doing things to call into question assumptions about the “inevitability” or “natural state” of many economic processes and organizational principles. In particular, the impact of digital technologies on our conceptions of property rights has potentially dramatic implications for the North-South divide and the distribution of power in the global political economy. Drawing on recent experiences with open-source property rights regimes, we present two scenarios, the “imperialism of property rights” and the “shared global digital infrastructure,” to highlight how debates over property-rights could influence the development of the global digital infrastructure and, in turn, contribute to significantly different outcomes in global economic power.

Globalization trends and innovations in the instructional technologies are widely believed to be creating new markets and forcing a revolution in higher education. Much of the rhetoric of globalists has presented a simplistic analysis of a paradigm shift in higher education markets and the way nations and institutions deliver educational services. This essay provides an analytical framework for understanding global influences on national higher education systems. It then identifies and discusses the countervailing forces to globalization that help to illuminate the complexities of the effects of globalization (including the General Agreement on Trade and Services) and new instructional technologies on the delivery and market for teaching and learning services. Globalization does offer substantial and potentially sweeping changes to national systems of higher education, but there is no uniform influence on nation-states or institutions. All globalization is in fact subject to local (or national and regional) influences.