Land tenure security: Revisiting and refining the concept for Sub-Saharan Africa's rural poor

In more developed societies the concept of land tenure security is implicit and backed by long standing institutions. In contrast, the concept is less recognised and carries divergent meanings in developing countries. In these contexts past conceptualisation efforts have favoured reductionist approaches: the concept is narrowed to one aspect or another, but, no shared agreement on a definition prevails. The absence of this basic theoretical knowledge impedes discourse on land policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. This paper contributes to this issue by revisiting and refining the concept of tenure security in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa's rural poor. Using a systematic review, scientific evidence on the conceptualization issue is provided. A typology of different schools of thought is developed: land tenure security is shown to be understood through (1) economic, (2) legal or (3) adaptation lenses. Generic constructs from these viewpoints tend to dominate the notion of tenure security and subsequent land policy formulation; however, it is argued that none adequately describe the totality of the concept. Using the review results and a systems approach a new inclusive concept of tenure security for rural poor in Sub-Saharan Africa is developed. The refined concept of security is defined as an emergent property of a land tenure system. The content of such security is explained by interactions between all elements of a land tenure system as a whole. It is concluded that rural poor in Sub-Saharan Africa can enjoy the total security when interactions between all elements occur in a dynamic equilibrium.     

新时代农村基层党组织引领乡村治理的挑战与突破

农村基层党组织是乡村治理的领导核心,引领乡村治理是巩固党执政基础的需要,也是建设使命型政党、服务型政党的要求。改革开放以来农村发生了深刻变化,乡村出现传统管控方式对基层的影响力减弱、基层的治理资源不足、农民分化引起群众动员和利益协调难度加大、基层组织结构失调等问题。基层党组织作为领导核心,必须进行要素整合,不断加强和提升政治领导力、群众组织力和社会服务力。     

The roles of social entrepreneurs in rural destination development

This paper seeks to explore how social entrepreneurs are relevant to our consideration of rural destination development. While many peripheral rural areas face significant challenges in terms of sustaining communities and attracting tourists it is often social entrepreneurs, as much as traditional entrepreneurs, who are involved in developing new ideas, new products and activities, and envisioning a future for the area. This study, which is based on case studies resulting from nine semi-structured interviews carried out in rural areas in Ireland, South Africa and USA, identifies key roles that social entrepreneurs play in terms of rural destination development; namely that of an opportunist, catalyst, and network architect, and this is used to build a theoretical framework within which SEs can be analyzed.     

数字金融对农村金融需求的异质性影响——来自中国家庭金融调查与北京大学数字普惠金融指数的证据

本文基于中国家庭金融调查和北京大学数字普惠金融指数,采用加入工具变量的面板数据回归,研究了数字金融对不同类别农村正规金融需求的异质性影响。结果表明:数字金融整体水平的提升一方面减少了农村生产性正规信贷需求概率,其中拥有智能手机的群体受影响更明显,另一方面也增加了农村消费性正规信贷需求概率,其中教育水平较高、有网购习惯的群体需求被激发较多,反映出数字金融提升效率、促进消费的多维度效应。本文首次通过实证方法研究了数字金融对农村金融需求的影响,为未来的农村金融政策提供了有益参考。     

Towards an intelligent country: China’s higher education expansion and rural children’s senior high school participation

Colleges in China were instructed to massively expand their enrollment beginning in 1999, an event referred to as China’s Higher Education Expansion (HEE). As the HEE explicitly enlarged the share of high-skilled labor, there may be a potential positive effect of the HHE on rural children’s willingness to enter senior high schools. This is because their chances to get into colleges are improved. This study found that, after controlling for other observable factors, the probability for rural eligible individuals to participate in senior high schools increased by 0.18 more than their urban counterparts from 2000 to 2005, and this result was indeed caused by the HHE via increased expected gains. Based on the empirical results, the expected returns to education are proven to be critical in educational decisions. To build an intelligent country, the government should raise returns to education by reforming the educational supply and eliminating the distortions and misallocations that depress returns to education.     

Worldwide trends in the scientific production on rural depopulation,a bibliometric analysis using bibliometrix R-tool

The scientific production on rural depopulation has grown in recent years. However, a global picture of the research carried out on this topic does not exist. The aim of this study is to identify the worldwide trends in rural depopulation scientific production over time in the main levels of analysis: sources, authors and documents. A bibliometric analysis was developed to analyse a final sample of 1150 articles published between 1979 and 2018. In order to develop the analysis, bibliometrix R-Tool was used and the metadata of two databases (WoS and Scopus) was retrieved and merged. Results show two major areas of co-citation networks; a poor network of collaboration between countries with some highlighted interaction; an author collaboration network with close groups of knowledge and two main themes resulting from a co-word analysis. The main conclusion is that rural depopulation is not yet a solid field of research and the most important themes identified are related to specific geographical areas. However, international collaborations are growing, new trends appearing, and other related fields are expressing greater interest in rural depopulation, which could indicate the preceding stage to an eventual consolidation of the theme. This finding can assist future research in this or related fields by providing a worldwide overview of rural depopulation research over time.     

A model for big spatial rural data infrastructure in Turkey: Sensor-driven and integrative approach

A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) enables the effective spatial data flow between providers and users for their prospective land use analyses. The need for an SDI providing soil and land use inventories is crucial in order to optimize sustainable management of agricultural, meadow and forest lands. In an SDI where datasets are static, it is not possible to make quick decisions about land use. Therefore, SDIs must be enhanced with online data flow and the capabilities to store big volumes of data. This necessity brings the concepts of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data (BD) into the discussion.Turkey needs to establish an SDI to monitor and manage its rural lands. Even though Turkish decision-makers and scientists have constructed a solid national SDI standardization, a conceptual model for rural areas has not been developed yet. In accordance with the international agreements, this model should adopt the INSPIRE Directive and Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) standards. In order to manage rural lands in Turkey, there are several legislations which characterize the land use planning, land classification and restrictions. Especially, the Soil Protection and Land Use Law (SPLUL) enforces to use a lot and a variety of land use parameters that should be available in a big rural SDI. Moreover, this model should be enhanced with IoT, which enables to use of smart sensors to collect data for monitoring natural occurrences and other parameters that may help to classify lands.This study focuses on a conceptual model of a Turkish big rural SDI design that combines the sensor usage and attribute datasets for all sorts of rural lands. The article initially reviews Turkish rural reforms, current enterprises to a national SDI and sensor-driven agricultural monitoring. The suggested model integrates rural land use types, such as agricultural lands, meadowlands and forest lands. During the design process, available data sets and current legislation for Turkish rural lands are taken into consideration. This schema is associated with food security databases (organic and good farming practices), non-agricultural land use applications and local/European subsidies in order to monitor the agricultural parcels on which these practices are implemented. To provide a standard visualization of this conceptual schema, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams are used and a supplementary data dictionary is prepared to make clear definitions of the attributes, data types and code lists used in the model.This conceptual model supports the LPIS, ISO 19156 International Standard (Geographic Information: Observations and Measurements) catalogue and INSPIRE data theme specifications due to the fact that Turkey is negotiating the accession to EU; however, it also provides a local understanding that enables to manage rural lands holistically for sustainable development goals. It suggests an expansion for the sensor variety of Turkish agricultural monitoring project (TARBIL) and it specifies a rural theme for Turkish National SDI (TUCBS).     

Developing the Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index in Two States of India

Rural women face many obstacles that thwart their well-being. Policies that seek to empower them, for example, by improving livelihood opportunities, often do not translate into improvements in other areas, notably in their nutritional status. Indeed, many existing measures of women’s empowerment have ambiguous associations with indicators of nutritional status. This is likely because existing operationalizations of empowerment often focus on aspects that are somewhat distal from factors that influence nutrition. In this paper, we present an index that aims to measure women’s empowerment in the realm of nutrition. We define nutritional empowerment as the process by which individuals acquire the capacity to be well fed and healthy, in a context where this capacity was previously denied to them. Our index draws on theory and multi-site formative research from South Asia and captures multiple dimensions of empowerment spanning domains that influence nutritional outcomes. We construct this index using data from two sites in India and validate it by estimating two nutritional outcomes, body mass index (BMI) and anemia, as a function of the index. We find that our index is significantly associated with these outcomes, indicating that, in rural South Asia, the women’s empowerment in nutrition index can assist researchers to understand the nutritional status of women and their families.     

Predicting fraud by investment managers

We test the predictability of investment fraud using a panel of mandatory disclosures filed with the SEC. We find that disclosures related to past regulatory and legal violations, conflicts of interest, and monitoring have significant power to predict fraud. Avoiding the 5% of firms with the highest ex ante predicted fraud risk would allow an investor to avoid 29% of fraud cases and over 40% of the total dollar losses from fraud. We find no evidence that investors receive compensation for fraud risk through superior performance or lower fees. We examine the barriers to implementing fraud prediction models and suggest changes to the SEC's data access policies that could benefit investors.     

链接与断裂:小农户与互联网市场衔接机制研究——以农村电商的生产经营实践为例

本文运用田野调查等质性研究方法,从微观层面探究从事农村电商的小农户与互联网市场的关系。农村电商使小农户具备了链接互联网市场的能力和途径、增加了收入、复兴了乡土手工业、缓解了农村的发展困局,在一定程度上重构了城乡关系。调查发现,随着农村电商的转型,在产业要素配置效率日渐失衡、农村营商环境的内在局限性和互联网市场游戏规则驯化的共同作用下,小农户与互联网市场的关系逐渐趋于断裂。电商村出现大批量小农户退出互联网市场和农村资源流失的现象,农村再次陷入原有的发展困境。因此,如何发挥政府的治理作用,并为农村电商的持续发展提供有效的公共服务,成为基层乡村治理的新任务和新挑战。