Determinants of the Choice of Agricultural Tenancy Contracts in Rural Bangladesh

Participation in the informal land market by farmers is always common in land scarce rural Bangladesh in response to failure of implementation of administratively based land reform system to meet increasing demand for cultivable land and to minimize discrepancy in distribution of factors at the farm level. The objective of the present study is to jointly determine the socio-economic factors underlying decision to lease-in or lease-out land and conditional on these decisions, tenant-land lord's choice of accepting and offering of share versus fixed rent contracts in rural Bangladesh agriculture. The focus is on the risk averseness and moral hazard problem for tenant land lord respectively. An empirical model of contract choice for both parties (tenants and land lords) is compared against a data set from a sample survey of IRRI and finds a mixed evidence of risk averseness among tenants and moral hazard problem among land lords. However, we find attributes of the land lord plays more important part to offer either a sharecropping contract or fixed rent contract than tenant's attributes to choose a contract between two alternatives. This indicates a monopoly power of land lords in Bangladesh in the informal tenancy market.Farm Management,

A Reassessment of Agriculture’s Role on the Rural Poverty Reduction Process in Bangladesh

In 2005, roughly 45% of the total populations of Bangladesh living below the poverty line and of them 53% are rural poor people. Therefore, a significant gain in rural poverty reduction will be crucial for Bangladesh to reach the national poverty reduction target. As 63% of the total employed people engage in some kind of agricultural activities, without pro-poor agricultural growth it is impossible for a country like Bangladesh to reduce poverty. This article attempts to analyse the impact of agricultural growth on rural poverty reduction by using time series analysis in Bangladesh during 1973 to 2003. The study shows that rural poverty reduction is possible by increased agricultural production, for which again efficient spending of government budget and skilled human capital are crucial factors. Also findings suggest that, increased the share of non-farm activities will help to poverty alleviation in rural Bangladesh.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Collaborative digitally-enabled business models for a circular economy: Sustaining, managing and protecting value in the UK plastics sector

Designing circular business models requires a combination of systems-level and company-level approaches, highlighting the importance of collaboration. While digital technologies can enable such business models, studies that shed light on the creation of multiple types of value in collaborative and digital technology-driven environments are currently limited. This paper, therefore, aims to explore the process of designing digitally enabled collaborative business models, using the UK plastics sector as a context that has seen a rise in new digital technology applications to plastics mandated by new regulations. To this end, we have worked with fifteen plastics sector organisations as part of an empirical qualitative study aiming to develop collaborative business models for a future plastics circular economy system in the UK. Together with the stakeholders, we have co-designed the value-retention and data-as-a-service business models that could be enabled by digital technologies such as tags. We show that the main stakeholder tensions relate to digital technology investments, access to recyclate and data, and digital asset management. We argue that such tensions might be the key cause of delaying experimentation with circular business models and enacting collaborations at the systems level. We suggest that future research could draw on quantitative data, such as investment costs to test these circular business models, in order to inform the discourse on infrastructural investments for sustainability.<br/

COVID-19 disruption is our chance to reduce flying for good. How?

Unless we give people cheap and attractive alternatives to flying, they will return to old habits once the pandemic is over and carbon emissions will rise again. Maria Sharmina, Alice Larkin (University of Manchester) and Naomi Vaughan (UEA) suggest practical ways to reduce air travel

Global challenges require cross-cutting solutions: bringing together water, energy, and food policy

New research led by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research suggests that current UK policies on water, energy and food are too fragmented to effectively tackle global challenges. Issues such as climate change, resource constraints and the increasing population cut across several sectors and need similarly cross-sectoral policies. Future research must meet this challenge by focusing on the nexus between sectors, scales and timeframes