The Chinese rose beetle, Adoretus sinicus Burmeister (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Rutelinae: Adoretini), is a broadly polyphagous scarab beetle that is economically important and causes damage to a wide variety of host plants including agricultural crops and ornamentals in Southeast Asia, China, the Hawaiian Islands and several other Pacific Islands. The species has become established in numerous...

Increasing rate of unemployment among the graduates of Iranian higher agricultural education system has been developed into one of the major socio-economic problems of the nation. Entrepreneurship is one of the most important factors contributing to economic and social development, that is, it is a main driver for employment creation. As such, many policy initiatives in Iran attempt to pull agr...

v AKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I would like to express my immense gratitude to my supervisors Marrit van den Berg and Adam Szirmai. Marrit van den Berg supported and helped me at all stages of a PhD marathon. I am very thankful that you agreed to be my supervisor without knowing me. You have been always ready to help and I could never imagine that it would be possible to receive answers to...

India as a predominantly agricultural country attributes a major share of its overall development to the agriculture sector. Indian agriculture is a miscellaneous and extensive sector involving a large number of stakeholders. India has one of the largest and institutionally most complex agricultural research systems in the world. However, such a complex research system was not a sudden developm...

In existing unemployment insurance programmes, it is standard to condition eligibility on the previous employment record of unemployed workers. The purpose of this article is to study conditions under which the efficient contract exhibits these properties. In order to do so, we characterize the optimal unemployment insurance contract in asymmetric information environments in which workers exper...

PURPOSE We investigated whether (1) current employment status (regular full-time, regular part-time and marginal employment) is associated with depressive symptoms and (2) whether these associations are mediated by current working conditions and previous employment history. METHODS Two cohorts of German employees aged 46 and 52 years were selected from administrative data of the German Federa...

Labor Market Impacts of a Large-Scale Public Works Program: Evidence from the Indian Employment Guarantee Scheme Recent years have seen an increasing interest in using public-works programs as antipoverty measures in developing countries. This paper analyzes the rural labor market impacts of the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind, b...

Agricultural systems science generates knowledge that allows researchers to consider complex problems or take informed agricultural decisions. The rich history of this science exemplifies the diversity of systems and scales over which they operate and have been studied. Modeling, an essential tool in agricultural systems science, has been accomplished by scientists from a wide range of discipli...

Sub-Saharan Africa has often been viewed by the development field as a homogenous entity with common problems requiring common strategies. Most countries in the region gained independence from European colonial rule in the early 1960s, but the process of forming agricultural strategies began much earlier. Agricultural strategies are perhaps the most important component of overall development st...