Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between food security and cleaner energy and evaluate the financial viability of both ethanol and biodiesel productions in Southern Brazil, the current battleground region among food, ethanol and biodiesel. Southeastern Brazil...

Purpose The Chinese Government initiates the targeted poverty alleviation strategy to lift 70.17 million population out of poverty in five years time until 2020. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the targeted poverty alleviation policy was implemented. The investigation focusses on...

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to examine chemical fertilizer use efficiency at the household level and provide an assessment of the causes of efficiency variation. Design/methodology/approach – A stochastic frontier production function approach is employed to estimate fertilizer...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to perform an investigative analysis of the distribution of agricultural growth in China and the evolution of the decision mechanism. Design/methodology/approach – The kernel density estimation method was used to investigate the distribution of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to fill a knowledge gap by examining the changes in fruit and vegetable consumption of Chinese households. Design/methodology/approach – Using 1993 and 2001 household survey data from three selected provinces in China, the authors estimated a quantile...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to apply a market efficiency theoretical framework to analyse and postulate solutions to the challenges confronting China in engaging smallholders in higher value, specialty, agricultural product markets. A marketing experiment/trial to test these ideas...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a financial liberalization index (FLI) and evaluate its impact on agricultural growth. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag approach to determine the long run and short coefficients. Findings – The...

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of remittance income on rural households in China. Design/methodology/approach – Using data from a large survey of farming households in three Chinese provinces, the impacts of remittances and other types of income on...