The impact of Transportation and Water Infrastructure Spending Source on Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. State and Local and Federal Government.

The principal objectives of this study are to analyze the effect of state and local governments and federal government transportation and water infrastructure spending on economic growth in the United States using historic data from 1980 to 2016.  The study finds that state and local governments had statistically significant impact on growth however, federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure had a strong positive and insignificant effect on economic growth. Also, shocks to infrastructure spending had a positive impact on economic growth. The study suggests raising state and local governments spending on water and transportation could have a significant impact on economic growth

Does Rural Operation System Reform Enhance Agricultural Output? Evidence from Sichuan Province

Rural operation system reform is vital in promoting rural revitalisation and agricultural and rural modernisation in China. Based on the sample data of 153 counties in Sichuan Province from 2012 to 2020, this paper constructs a PSM-DID evaluation model to analyse the effectiveness of rural operation system reform on agricultural development from the perspective of policy action mechanism, variable differentiation and other aspects. The results show that: (1) rural operation system reform has significantly boosted the economic development of the counties implementing the pilot reform of the rural operation system; (2) rural operation system reform mainly has two components: rural land system reform and agriculture organisation innovation; both have an impact on county economic and social development, but the degrees of impact are different; (3) the effectiveness of the rural operation system reform policy has a specific time lag. The results of this paper enrich the effectiveness evaluation of the reform policy on economic development and have policy implications for further promotion of agricultural and rural reform in China

Can Land Circulation Improve the Health of Middle-Aged and Older Farmers in China?

Compared with the urban aging population, the rural aging population in China is larger, and is subject to a lower per capita income, lower social security coverage, and insufficient security capacity. Therefore, ensuring the health of middle-aged and older farmers is an inevitable requirement for maintaining the stability of rural areas and society. This study uses data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) 2018, an ordered probit model and instrumental variable approach to empirically analyze the effect of land circulation out on the physical health of middle-aged and older farmers over 45. The results indicate that land circulation out positively and significantly affects farmers’ health. Again, farmer’s non-agricultural work and household income play a significant role in this positive relationship between land circulation out and farmers’ health. Thus, the promotion of non-agricultural work for farmers and household income enhancement could alleviate household budget constraints while increasing health investment. The findings provide policies advocating for rural health development from land circulation perspectives

The Organic Marketing Nexus: The Effect of Unpaid Marketing Practices on Consumer Engagement

Designing a digital marketing strategy that stimulates consumer engagement is vital and challenging for digital marketers. Despite previous research on this topic, little is known about the unpaid (organic) strategies of digital marketing and how they attract web traffic through consumer engagement. Based on the stimuli–organism–response model, this study examined the effects of three organic marketing practices related to electronic commerce shopping platforms, namely, search engine optimization, social media posts, and user-generated content, on consumer engagement. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze 464 responses from followers of five electronic commerce firms’ Facebook fan pages. Based on the stimuli–organism–response paradigm, we found that organic marketing practices positively impact consumers’ behavioral engagement; however, consumers’ psychological engagement partially mediates these impacts. Further, consumers’ attention to social comparison of consumption dampens the positive effect of search engine optimization and psychological engagement on consumers’ behavioral engagement. The findings of this paper improve our understanding of the roles played by organic digital marketing practices in attracting consumer engagement and provide guidelines for digital marketers on how to utilize unpaid marketing strategies to attract authentic consumer engagement. This study presents a new framework in measuring the digital marketing strategies available to electronic commerce firms exploring unpaid marketing strategies

Impact of climate change on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Can financial development offset the damages?

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is one of the least carbon emitter regions in the world; nevertheless, this region is not immune to the effects of climate change. While SSA has not yet fully recovered from the socioeconomic effects of the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the crisis in Russia and Ukraine has further affected several SSA nations by driving up already high food prices even higher and limiting people’s access to food. To address these challenges, this study explored the moderating role of financial development (represented by domestic credit) in the climate change (represented by carbon dioxide emissions) and food security (represented by cereal production) nexus using a panel of 27 SSA countries and data ranging from 1990 to 2019. The study applied Lewbel’s two-stage least squares and the outcomes showed that carbon dioxide emissions hamper cereal production in SSA; however, financial development mitigates the negative effects of carbon dioxide emissions on cereal production. The study found that beyond the threshold value of 2.698 financial development will help SSA mitigate the negative impact of carbon dioxide emissions on cereal production. The study proposed the establishment of a proper financial reform to assist the banking industries expand their credit supply to farming communities in a flexible manner to support cereal production in SSA

Study on the Impact of Air Pollution on Agricultural Export Trade

With the gradual intensification of the global environmental pollution trend, air pollution has a vital impact role in agricultural export trade. This manuscript uses balanced panel data from 30 Chinese provinces and districts from 2005–2019 in China to empirically verify the mechanism of the impact of air pollution on agricultural exports. The following results were achieved using the fixed effect and moderating effect model. The results show that air pollution significantly inhibits the growth of agricultural export trade. In particular, the presence of environmental regulations will weaken this adverse effect. Regionally, the negative impact of air pollution on China’s agricultural export trade in large agricultural provinces is significantly greater than that in non-agricultural areas. To ensure the sustainable development of China’s agricultural export trade, we should strengthen the ability to cope with air pollution, actively expand diversified international markets, and strive to improve the technological content and green level of exported agricultural products in order to achieve innovative green development of agricultural export trade

Residential energy expenditures and the relevance of financial inclusion across location, wealth quintiles and household structures

This paper examines the relative role of financial inclusion in enhancing households’ ability to spend on energy consumption across rural and urban locations. It uses comprehensive household data from Ghana and employs the ordinary least square (OLS) as well as an instrumental variable estimation technique. Endogeneity of financial inclusion is instrumented using distance to the nearest bank. Our findings suggest that a standard deviation increase in financial inclusion contributes to an improvement in residential energy expenditure by 1.2835 standard deviations. This finding is robust to different methods for resolving endogeneity and alternative weighting schemes in the financial inclusion construct. Among the different sources of energy for lighting and cooking, financial inclusion increases expenditure on LPG and electricity more than the others. Financial inclusion increases the ability to spend more on residential energy in urban, poorest, and female-headed dual-parent households. Household net income is a key pathway through which financial inclusion affects residential energy expenditure

The impact of credit accessibility on rural households clean cooking energy consumption: The case of Ghana

This study examined the impact of credit received on rural household clean cooking energy consumption. The study pays more attention to clean energies, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and kerosene. Due to the endogenous issue of credit, we employed an instrumental variable approach (IV-Probit and IV-Tobit). We analyzed the survey data collected from four regions, Savannah, Bono East, Eastern and central, in Ghana. The result of the econometrics model depicted that household head relationship with an individual in the city, education level, access to off-farm employment, age, household size, and amount of credit received influences the household's probability of consuming and spending on clean cooking energies Concerning the amount of credit received impact on clean cooking energy expenditure, rural households in the eastern region compared to their counterparts were more pronounced. Our findings explored the importance of credit on energy consumption and provided policy implications to enhance clean cooking energy consumption

Effects of Intergenerational Care Behavior on Residents’ Nutrition Intake—Descriptive Statistical Analysis of Rural China Survey 2010–2014

Nutritional status plays an indispensable role in enhancing human capital and preventing the return to poverty. In the context of the three-child policy and the aging society in China, intergenerational care will inevitably become a core component of family support. Thus, this paper evaluates the impacts of intergenerational care behavior on nutritional intake in Chinese rural residents from the perspective of household consumption. The study’s data is from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) (2010–2014), and, the fixed effect model and analyses are applied to achieve the study’s objective. The results reveal that rural residents with intergenerational family care behavior have significantly higher food diversity. Thus, Chinese rural residents with intergenerational care consumed 22.4% more food. A possible mechanism is that intergenerational care improves young mothers’ labor participation and income, thus optimizing their dietary structure. Moreover, there was heterogeneity concerning the nutrition intake among rural residents in different geographic and family net income groups. Finally, the robust check is consistent with the baseline regression results. In summary, governments should fully affirm the elderly contribution to families to give full play to the elderly family benefit maximization

Do disclosure of ESG information policies inhibit the value of heavily polluting Enterprises?—Evidence from China

Green governance and high-quality green development are crucial to the growth of enterprises; therefore, this paper examines how environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) disclosure policies affect the value of heavily polluting companies. The study's data is from the new version of the Governance Guidelines for Public Companies promulgated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in 2018. Thus, the data of China's public companies from 2011 to 2021 is used for the study's analysis. The methods applied for our estimation analysis are the differences-in-differences (DID) and the mediation effect model. The findings depict that ESG information disclosure policies can significantly inhibit the corporate value of heavily polluting enterprises (HPE). Enterprise technological innovation plays a mediating effect in this mechanism; that is, after introducing the policy, it effectively alleviates the information asymmetry and promotes enterprise technological innovation, but it also damages the enterprise value. Further analysis shows that the inhibition effect of ESG information disclosure policy on the value of HPE is heterogeneous, and for non-state-owned enterprises, ESG information disclosure policies have a stronger inhibitory effect. Also, there is little difference between the central and western regions and the eastern region in terms of the inhibitory effect of ESG disclosure policies on the value of HPE. The conclusion of this paper is conducive to improving the information disclosure policy of listed companies and promoting the green development of enterprises