Providing basic financial services to rural people can enhance their security by eliminating the need for them to hold cash and can offer them alternative venues for borrowing. Placing a branch in rural villages is not however cost effective. In recent years, the concept of branchless banking has emerged in which a person who has a phone and sufficient liquidity (called a shopkeeper hereafter) ...

Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions might entail substantial welfare implications for the affected rural population. Whether the impacts are indeed as devastating as the popular notion of “land grabs” would suggest depends on a number of factors, including the size of compensation payments, productivity spillovers on smallholders, employment opportunities for displaced farmers, and chang...

Food prices have more than doubled between mid-2006 and mid-2008, creating major distress among the poor across the world, but also gainers among farm producers. While transmission was largely averted in India, increasingly open food markets indicate the need to anticipate the welfare implications of a repetition of such events in the future. This paper simulates the welfare effects of the rise...

Organically produced food seems not to be able to feed the World’s Population. However, there are strong evidences that organic agriculture might help to alleviate the number of people suffering from hunger in some areas. The distribution of food and the access to food are often the main factors why people are undernourished. Aside, conventional agriculture often causes strong negative external...

Indian economy is rural in character. This is evident from the fact that a very high proportion of the population is living in rural areas. Further two-thirds of its workforce is engaged in agricultural and allied activities, which contribute about 27% of India’s gross domestic product. In a predominantly agrarian country like India, rural development is a sine qua non for national development....

Developing biomass-based power generation is helpful for China to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and to release the targets of carbon emission peak. The decentralized farming method leads to Chinese farmers’ weak willingness to collect and sell crop residues to biomass-based power plants. The purpose of this paper is to solve the issue by proposing a novel biomass feedstock supply model ...

The 2003 reform of the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy introduced a decoupled income support for farmers called the Single Farm Payment (SFP). Concerns were raised about possible future land use and production changes and their impact on rural communities. Here, such concerns are considered against the workings of the SFP in three EU Member States. Various quantitative studies ...

The objective of this study was to determine the impact of the New South Wales Rural Hearing Conservation Program on the implementation of personal hearing protection (PHP) and noise management strategies among farmers who had participated in this program in New South Wales, Australia. A follow-up survey of a random sample of people screened through the New South Wales Rural Hearing Conservatio...

BACKGROUND In the last decade, scrub typhus (ST) has been emerging or re-emerging in some areas of Asia, including Guangzhou, one of the most affected endemic areas of ST in China. METHODS Based on the data on all cases reported in Guangzhou from 2006 to 2014, we characterized the epidemiological features, and identified environmental determinants for the spatial distribution of ST using a pa...

diversity, accessibility and reliability are the three main factors governing the adoption of information sources by farmers in rural areas. based on the research hypothesis, the existing knowledge and information delivery system in the agricultural sector, functions far below the ever changing nature and tangible needs of existing farming systems. the main objective in this study is to determi...