Moving off the farm: Land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in China

Agriculture has made major contributions to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing on an 8-year panel of 1,200 households in six key provinces, it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land-use certificates on agricultural productivity growth, as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non-farm sector. It finds that land tenure insecurity, measured by the history of past land reallocations, discourages households from quitting agriculture. The recognitionof land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor. Both factors have a large impact on productivity (at about 30 percent each), mainly by encouraging market-based land transfers. A sustained increase in non-agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure, which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas.Labor Policies,Rural Development Knowledge&Information Systems,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Growth,Rural Poverty Reduction

Does female reservation affect long-term political outcomes ? Evidence from rural India

Although many studies have explored the impacts of political quotas for females, often with ambiguous results, the underlying mechanisms and long-term effects have received little attention. This paper uses nation-wide data from India spanning a 15-year period to explore how reservations affect leader qualifications, service delivery, political participation, local accountability, and individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods. Although leader quality declines and impacts on service quality are often negative, gender quotas are shown to increase the level and quality of women's political participation, the ability to hold leaders to account, and the willingness to contribute to public goods. Key effects persist beyond the reserved period and impacts on females often materialize only with a lag.Housing&Human Habitats,Population Policies,Gender and Law,Gender and Health,Parliamentary Government

Threshold for the Outbreak of Cascading Failures in Degree-degree Uncorrelated Networks

In complex networks, the failure of one or very few nodes may cause cascading failures. When this dynamical process stops in steady state, the size of the giant component formed by remaining un-failed nodes can be used to measure the severity of cascading failures, which is critically important for estimating the robustness of networks. In this paper, we provide a cascade of overload failure model with local load sharing mechanism, and then explore the threshold of node capacity when the large-scale cascading failures happen and un-failed nodes in steady state cannot connect to each other to form a large connected sub-network. We get the theoretical derivation of this threshold in degree-degree uncorrelated networks, and validate the effectiveness of this method in simulation. This threshold provide us a guidance to improve the network robustness under the premise of limited capacity resource when creating a network and assigning load. Therefore, this threshold is useful and important to analyze the robustness of networks.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Oxonium picrate

The title compound, H3O+·C6H2N3O7 −, consists of one picrate anion and one oxonium cation. The oxonium cation is located on a crystallographic twofold axis and both its H atoms are disordered, each over two symmetry-equivalent positions with occupancy ratios of 0.75. The picrate anions are also located on twofold axes bis­ecting the phenolate and p-nitro groups. π–π inter­actions between the rings of the picrates [centroid-to-centroid distances of 3.324 (2) Å] connect the anions to form stacks along the a-axis direction. The stacks are further joined together by the protonated water mol­ecules through hydrogen bonds to form two-dimensional sheets extending parallel to the ab plane. The sheets are stacked on top of each other along the c-axis direction and connected through C—H⋯O inter­actions between the CH groups of the benzene rings and the picrate nitro groups, with C⋯O distances of 3.450 (2) Å

Anti-osteoporosis effect of Cistanche deserticola Ma extract in ovariectomized rats

Purpose: To investigate the therapeutic effects of Cistanche deserticola Ma. extract (CDME) on ovariectomy-induced osteoporosis in rats.Methods: Female Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to a control group and five ovariectomy (OVX) subgroups, that is, OVX with vehicle (OVX), OVX with 17ß-estradiol (E2, 25 μg/kg/day), and OVX with CDME doses (40, 80, or 160 mg/kg/day). Daily oral administration of E2 or CDME started 4 weeks after OVX and lasted for 16 weeks. Bone mineral density (BMD) of L4 vertebrae and right femur of rats was estimated, The length of each femur was measured, and biochemical analysis of serum and urine specimens were performed.Results: CDME dose-dependently inhibited the reduction in BMD of L4 vertebrae (0.23 ± 0.02 g/cm3, p < 0.05) and femurs (0.20 ± 0.03 g/cm3, p < 0.05) caused by OVX and prevented the deterioration of trabecular microarchitecture (p < 0.05), which were accompanied by a significant decrease in skeletal remodeling (p < 0.05) as evidenced by the lower levels of bone turnover markers.Conclusion: This study indicates that CDME prevents OVX-induced osteoporosis in rats, and could be used for treating osteoporosis in elderly women.Keywords: Cistanche deserticola, Osteoporosis, Ovariectomy, Bone mineral density, Femu

Ethyl 5-methyl­imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine-2-carboxyl­ate

The title compound, C11H12N2O2, was synthesized from the reaction of 6-methyl­pyridin-2-amine and ethyl 3-bromo-2-oxopropionate. In the mol­ecular structure, the six- and five-membered rings are individually almost planar with r.m.s. deviations of 0.003 and 0.002 Å, respectively. The two rings are almost coplanar, the dihedral angle between their planes being 1.4 (3)°. Inter­molecular C—H⋯O and C—H⋯N hydrogen bonds are present in the crystal structure

Topological kink plasmons on magnetic-domain boundaries.

Two-dimensional topological materials bearing time reversal-breaking magnetic fields support protected one-way edge modes. Normally, these edge modes adhere to physical edges where material properties change abruptly. However, even in homogeneous materials, topology still permits a unique form of edge modes - kink modes - residing at the domain boundaries of magnetic fields within the materials. This scenario, despite being predicted in theory, has rarely been demonstrated experimentally. Here, we report our observation of topologically-protected high-frequency kink modes - kink magnetoplasmons (KMPs) - in a GaAs/AlGaAs two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) system. These KMPs arise at a domain boundary projected from an externally-patterned magnetic field onto a uniform 2DEG. They propagate unidirectionally along the boundary, protected by a difference of gap Chern numbers ([Formula: see text]) in the two domains. They exhibit large tunability under an applied magnetic field or gate voltage, and clear signatures of nonreciprocity even under weak-coupling to evanescent photons

In-silico investigations into natural products as nonnucleoside DNA methyltransferase 1 inhibitors for treating epi-mutation in gastric cancer

Purpose: To explore in silico methods to search for the best reported non-nucleoside DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) inhibitor of epimutation in gastric cancer.Methods: A dataset of reported non-nucleoside DNMT1 inhibitors was used to target the active site of crystallized DNMT1 protein. Molecular docking simulations were carried out using AutoDock 4.2.6 l. The results were analyzed using Discovery studio visualizer.Results: In silico analysis of known natural non-nucleoside DNMT1 inhibitors gave genistein as the top ranked compound with ΔG of -6.39 Kcal/mol. Further, the results indicated that epigallocatechin gallate and curcumin are poor non-nucleoside DNMT1 inhibitors, as the in silico data suggest that they failed to bind to the catalytic site of DNMT1.Conclusion: The results indicate that genistein is the top rated compound for DNMT1 inhibition. Previous in vitro and in vivo work by other researchers seem to validate the findings of the study.Keywords: Epi-mutation, DNA methyltransferase, Non-nucleoside, DNMT1 inhibitor, Dockin