Digital transformation is increasingly recognised as a means to help unlocking the benefits of more inclusive and sustainable growth and enhanced social well-being. In the environmental context, digitalisation can contribute to decoupling economic activity from natural resource use and their...

Industry has a particular responsibility to shape the transformation from our current economy into an ecologically and socially sustainable one. The ongoing digitalization and networking of industrial value chains as the core of Industry 4.0 offer new opportunities and capabilities for...

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are a major part of the industrial economies. Their survival and growth has therefore been a prominent issue. Research and development (R&D) enables firms to create new technologies and/or to build on existing technologies obtained through technology...

Economic research tends to focus on a reduced set of crops, leaving a vast array of crops under-researched. However, these 'marginal crops' have typically been farmed for centuries and are better suited for the local environment in which they are grown than crops prioritized within existing...

There is widespread consensus that agricultural technology has an important role to play for poverty reduction and sustainable development. There is less consensus, however, about the types of technologies that are best suited for smallholder farmers in Africa. While some consider natural...

This paper incorporates interdisciplinary New Institutional Economics and suggests a holistic framework for assessing the forms and efficiency of environmental management in agriculture. First, it defines environmental management as a specific system of social order regulating behaviour and...

American agricultural law's environmental record is a legacy of legislative failure. Most of the blame can and should be attributed to the failure of the law to separate ecological objectives from competing and ultimately contradictory economic objectives. Two strains of agroecological fallacies...

This chapter studies the interface in poor countries of population growth, rural poverty, and deterioration of the local natural-resource base, a subject that has been much neglected by modern demographers and development economists. The motivations for procreation in rural communities of the...

A main problem in emerging countries is the reduction of poverty in rural areas with sustainable agricultural systems. This study analyses differences between agroecology (a pattern of sustainable economic development with ecological processes directed to reduce production costs and support...

Increasing food demand will most likely be met with agricultural intensification and land clearing, exacerbating environmental consequences associated with food supply. The mechanisms and trade-offs between agriculture and the environment are heterogeneous and not well understood, yet key to...