The Nile is the lifeblood of northeastern Africa, and its roles for and interdependency with the national economies it traverses and binds together grow as it moves from source to sea. With rapid economic development-population growth, irrigation development, rural electrification, and overall...

The article empirically examines the timing of initial decisions to adopt food safety systems and subsequent decisions to maintain the certification. Survival models are used to evaluate firm-level decisions among seafood processors in the Philippines. Whereas initial certification decisions...

Contract farming has gained in importance in many developing countries. Previous studies analysed effects of contracts on smallholder farmers’ welfare, yet mostly without considering that different types of contractual relationships exist. Here, we examine associations between contract farming...

Attaining food security for all requires well-functioning institutions and policy process that are effective in designing and implementing food and agricultural policies and programs. This paper assesses early stages of the decentralization and institutional reforms in the policymaking processes...

In the existing literature, the effects of contract farming on household welfare were examined with mixed results. Most studies looked at single contract types. This paper contributes to the literature by comparing two types of contracts - simple marketing contracts and resource-providing...

We use several datasets to study whether son preference prevails in the human capital investment among Chinese rural-urban migrant households. We find that son preference exists among the rural migrants' households and that it caused lower probabilities relative to that of their boy counterparts...

We study how the migration decision of young women in rural China is shaped by the return arrangement and opportunities of college education. Women outnumbered men in young rural-urban migrants in the early 2000s, but the surplus of young women has recently disappeared. We propose that the...

We use several datasets to study whether son preference prevails in the human capital investment among Chinese rural-urban migrant households. We find that son preference exists among the rural migrants’ households and that it caused lower probabilities relative to that of their boy...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a mathematical model for the prediction of railway freight volume, and therefore provide railway freight resource allocation with an accurate direction. With an accurate railway freight volume prediction, railway freight enterprises can integrate...

Purpose: The purpose of study is to solve the multi-modal transportation routing planning problem that aims to select an optimal route to move a consignment of goods from its origin to its destination through the multi-modal transportation network. And the optimization is from two viewpoints...