1. Secure, transferable rights + digital cadastre → unlocks credit, long-horizon investment, and reduces disputes. Systematic reviews generally find positive effects on investment/incomes, though not in every setting.
2. Active land rental/sales markets & consolidation → larger operated farm sizes raise TFP; anti-fragmentation and easy leasing matter more than blunt ceilings. Quantitative work shows mis-designed reforms can lower productivity by shrinking average farm size.
3. Tenancy security (e.g., sharecropper rights) → linked to lower poverty in India-style reforms; Pakistani studies also tie contract structure to investment behavior.
4. Water rights & irrigation governance → critical in Pakistan (79% of cultivated area irrigated). Without this, land reform alone under-delivers.
5. Complementary pieces: farm-to-market roads, storage/cold chain, crop insurance, and fair agri taxation.

Why the GDP needle can move

• Agriculture is big: ~23–24% of GDP recently, so productivity gains here have economy-wide bite, plus upstream/downstream linkages (inputs, textiles, food).
• Structure of holdings: millions of very small farms; new 2024/25 census shows extreme smallholder prevalence and rising owner-operation—so policies that enable operated scale (via rental/cluster farming) can have outsized effects.
• Past “reforms” under-performed (1959, 1972, 1977) because they focused on ceilings without fixing markets/records/tenancy—useful caution for design.

A simple way to size the GDP impact

Let s_{ag} be agri share of GDP (~0.235). If reform raises agri TFP/output by x% over ~10 years, direct GDP level gain ≈ s_{ag}\times x. With conservative spillovers/multipliers (agro-processing, textiles) of ~1.3–1.5, total effect is larger.

Why these ranges are plausible:

• Cross-country evidence shows property-rights/tenancy reforms can lift investment/productivity and reduce poverty, though results vary by design and enforcement.
• Cautionary results: reforms that fragment or cap farm sizes without enabling consolidation can reduce productivity—so design matters as much as ambition.

Pakistan-specific design checklist (practical)

• Finish a fit-for-purpose cadastre (digital, map-based, updatable) with low-cost, fast dispute resolution.
• Legalize & de-risk land rental (standard contracts, registry, mediation) to allow operated consolidation without forced sales.
• Tenancy security (clear rights, predictable sharing rules) to encourage soil/crop investment; avoid perverse incentives that trigger mass evictions (seen around weakly-designed tenancy laws).
• Water governance (warabandi modernization, canal maintenance, volumetric incentives, groundwater rules) so land gains translate into yields. Pakistan’s heavy irrigation footprint makes this pivotal.
• Market access & storage (roads, cold chain, grades/standards) to capture price premia and shrink post-harvest loss.