Urbanization strategies, rural development and land use changes in China: A multiple-level integrated assessment

This paper links urbanization strategies to changes in land use and associated impacts on rural communities and agro-ecosystems in a rural area of China. Energy, monetary and human time variables as well as information on environmental pressures, have been combined to compare different typologies of households and the metabolism of different patterns of land use from an integrated perspective. The results show that urbanization strategies, aimed at shifting the current land use and at displacing the local population, while increasing the economic efficiency is also associated with an increase in fossil energy consumption and environmental pressure, as well as a reduction of the multifunctional characteristic of the area under investigation. Based on these findings the paper also offers a critical discussion of the Chinese rural development policy arguing that the multifunctionality of rural areas should be taken into account by Chinese policy-makers and planners as a viable strategy to achieve rural development targets.     

Market access,organic farming and productivity: the effects of Fair Trade affiliation on Thai farmer producer groups*

The study analyses the impact of Fair Trade (FT) and organic farming on a sample of FT rice producers in Thailand. It finds that per capita income from agriculture is positively and significantly affected by years of organic certification and FT affiliation. The estimated FT and organic certification contributions to producers’ economic well‐being are higher when account is taken of the relatively higher proportion of self‐consumption among affiliated farmers. But the per capita income effect does not translate into higher productivity owing to a concurrent increase in hours worked.     

Small sample properties of ML estimator in Vasicek and CIR models: a simulation experiment

Decisions in Economics and Finance - In this paper we analyze small sample properties of the ML estimation procedure in Vasicek and CIR models. In particular, we consider short time series, with a...