Rural infrastructure is crucial for agriculture, agro-industries and overall economic development of rural areas. It also, incidentally, provides basic amenities that improve the quality of life. However, infrastructure projects, including those in rural sector, involve huge initial investments, long gestation periods, high incremental capital output ratio, high risk and low rate of returns on ...

Although, once, in the far past, sending gifts and missionaries was called a type of public diplomacy, today it is manifested as academic disciplines, policy making institutions, and multi-purpose organizations. The most important institutions of these kinds, now, exist in the US, whose purpose is to promote the politics of this country as Public Diplomacy and to follow local and international ...

Across Canada, discrepancies of access to broadband exist between urban centres and rural and remote Aboriginal communities. Government, public and private sector organizations are partnering to address these digital divides. Some employ a ‘First Mile’ approach that foregrounds how community-based institutions are driving development. This article provides a First Mile case study from the Inuit...

Empirical observation can confirm that not all rural communities enjoy an optimal level of local public goods: some public goods are provided more often and in a better quality than others. Given the vital importance of public goods for the welfare of local communities (among which the management of the local natural resource base for sustainable development plays a relevant role), the relation...

Blockchain technology enables the creation of a decentralized environment where transactions and data are not under the control of any third party organization. Any transaction ever completed is recorded in a public ledger in a verifiable and permanent way. Based on blockchain technology, we propose a global higher education credit platform, named EduCTX. This platform is based on the concept o...

In the mind of the general public, the rural sector is equal to agriculture and for a great majority of policymakers, rural development continues to mean agricultural development. Not surprisingly, it is a sector traditionally covered at the governmental level by the ministries of agriculture, and at the international development level by agencies with an agricultural development mandate such a...