18 pages, Based on panel data from the Rural Fixed Point Survey of the Ministry of
Agriculture over the period 2004-2016 and supplementary survey data on information
and communications technology (ICT) applications in the countryside, this paper employs
the difference in differences (DID) method to analyze the effects of ICT applications on
rural households’ agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) with mobile phone signal,
internet and 3G mobile network connections as indicators, and decomposes and evaluates
the constituent factors. Our findings reveal a positive effect of ICTs on rural households’
TFP, which primarily stemmed from rising agricultural technical efficiency. However, ICTs
exerted no significant effect on agricultural technical progress during this paper’s data
period due to limited rural human capital. These findings are consistent with robustness test
results based on counterfactual and matching methods.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 163 Document Number: D11646
Notes:
8 pages., Results of Gallup World Poll 2019. Online from publisher., "On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Gallup offers a snapshot of how satisfied people in 145 countries and areas around the world were in 2019 with their efforts to preserve the environment and with the quality of their air and water."
Benavidez, Justin R. (author), Ribera, Luis A. (author), and Thayer, Anastasia (author)
Format:
Paper
Publication Date:
2020
Published:
International
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 201 Document Number: D11717
Notes:
Paper presented at the 2020 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Annual Meeting, Kansas City, Missouri, July 26-28, 2020. 20 pages., Authors assessed the impact of tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump on agricultural commodity prices during the trade war with China. Results indicated tht days with high counts of tweets with keywords associated with the 2018-2019 trade war led to statistically significant structural breaks in the price series for hogs, corn, cotton, and soybeans.
21 pages, Multiple dynamics jointly determine who we befriend, however, researchers have failed to systematically assess which processes matter most under different circumstances. Here I draw on observations around how the demands of paddy rice cultivation shape social interaction to demonstrate that the relative importance of reciprocity, transitivity and generalised exchange to who rice producers choose as friends varies with the amount of agricultural land under their control. In doing so, I use unique data on farm size and friendship amongst 4713 rice-growing smallholders in 162 rural villages in Jiangxi, China along with a new technique for measuring the relative importance of effects in Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models. In line with the micro-level component of the recently advanced “theory of network ecology”, results suggest that features of an individual’s proximal environment can powerfully moderate the relative expression of network-formation mechanisms such that for some individuals, a dynamic may be expected to hold substantial sway over the process of choosing social contacts and, for others, no sway at all.
