Agricultural Economics最新文献

High transaction costs and information asymmetry in developing countries not only constrain land transactions but also limit them among village acquaintances, hindering the marketization of land. E-commerce, emerging as a new phenomenon in rural areas, has the potential to disrupt this status quo. Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2017 and 2019 China Rural Household Panel Survey, this study employs a panel Tobit model and propensity score matching approach to examine the relationship between agricultural e-commerce and the transformation of land rental markets. Our findings reveal that agricultural e-commerce is associated with higher land rents by attracting agricultural operators and enhancing agricultural profitability, thereby facilitating the transformation of land rental markets. The association is further strengthened by road infrastructure, with better road infrastructure enhancing the positive link between agricultural e-commerce and land rents. Moreover, the correlation between agricultural e-commerce and land rents is more pronounced in households with more female members and weaker political and economic ties, reflecting the value of agricultural e-commerce in promoting inclusive development. In addition, agricultural e-commerce is positively influenced by the formalization of land leases through written contracts. These findings highlight the importance of agricultural e-commerce in fostering the development of the land rental market in China and other developing countries, emphasizing the need for policies to support its continued growth.

As countries develop and experience structural transformation, the gendered patterns of labor change. We use harmonized labor force data and do not find evidence that women's share of the agricultural labor force is positively correlated with per capita income. Yet, the evidence shows many changes taking place that vary across locations. We identify five areas that require attention to understand these processes of change: the patterns of joint ownership and management among smallholder farmers, the responses to the migration of men off-farm, shifts across sectoral boundaries, time spent on domestic services and care work, and the impact on empowerment. It is important to go beyond the number of people employed in production agriculture to understand the many ways that the gendered patterns of labor are changing.

The agricultural sector offers employment for a large share (⅛) of the global population, yet there are various employment challenges, including precarious working conditions and labor market frictions, contributing to labor shortages in some—and unemployment in other—regions. It remains unclear which policy tools are best suited to address these challenges as the extant evidence is scattered, limited, and lacks a comprehensive overview of policy options. Here, we fill this gap by offering the first literature review on this topic, unraveling the complexity of employment challenges, providing an overview of policy tools, and proposing a policy and research agenda. Our overview shows that a bundle of coherent, national, and international policies is needed to address the interconnected and global nature of employment challenges in agriculture. Many such tools are available but few of them have been rigorously evaluated, often because suitable data are lacking. Our contribution is timely, given the surge in public interest in social sustainability, the proliferation of policies for decent work in agriculture, and limited research guiding these efforts.

In recent years, the policy discourse in South Asia has increasingly focused on reducing pressure on groundwater use in irrigated agriculture and reducing irrigation energy subsidies, without making farmers worse off. In an environment where pricing water and energy is administratively and politically challenging, much hope is placed on the widespread adoption of irrigation technologies that improve irrigation efficiency. This paper highlights knowledge gaps in this discourse, to identify avenues where research could inform evidence-based decision-making.

The need for agrifood systems transformation to improve economic, environmental, equity, and health outcomes is widely recognized. Attention typically focuses on changing farming practices, consumers’ dietary choices, or both. Midstream agrifood value chain actors, who intermediate between primary producers and food consumers, too often get overlooked. This paper explains the importance of inducing midstream agrifood value chain actors to become active agents of agrifood systems transformation, discusses policy tools that can accelerate needed changes, and highlights key topics for future economics research.

Open-air straw burning (OSB) is a practice prevalent in developing countries that presents substantial risks to public health. However, the prevalence of OSB in these countries is not due to the absence of regulations but the insufficient enforcement of existing regulations at the local level. This study investigates an OSB management reform in China, which aims to leverage digital technology, specifically satellites, to enhance the local enforcement of OSB regulations. We evaluate the effectiveness of this reform by exploring a unique county-level satellite-based dataset and employing a staggered difference-in-differences approach combined with the two-part model. We found that this reform led to a reduction in counties’ OSB spots by 56.50%. Furthermore, its effectiveness is higher in counties with higher fiscal expenditure-to-revenue ratios, designation as national ecological function zones, higher levels of agricultural mechanization, and livestock production. These findings underscore the importance of digital technology in OSB governance and other related environmental governance areas by enhancing transparency and information flow in the local enforcement of regulations.