Suchergebnisse

AbstractImproving technical efficiency in agriculture can play an important role in meeting present and future demands for agricultural products, at the same time enhancing the long-term sustainability of land and water use. This paper examines the impact of household perceptions of land tenure security on technical efficiency using detailed household-level data collected in Minle County in northwest China. The authors find that the (perceived) tenure security provided by land certificates encourages part-time farming with relatively low technical efficiency. The renting out of land by households with migrant members can only partly make up for this negative effect, because land rental markets are thin and highly fragmented. Therefore, the provision of land certificates to rural households has a negative impact on technical efficiency. For tenure security provided by the expected absence of land reallocations in the near future, on the other hand, the authors find that it reduces temporary migration and thereby contributes to higher technical efficiency.

Rural areas in many developing countries lack an effective waste management system, leading to poor environmental hygiene. As an initial but integral step toward sustainable waste management, fostering better household compliance with waste‐sorting regulation has become an important policy agenda. This paper devotes attention to evaluating the effectiveness of extrinsic incentives, more specifically, reward–penalty schemes, on promoting rural households' participation in waste sorting. By exploiting an original survey of 1,058 rural households conducted in the Taihu Basin of China, we empirically find that (1) reward–penalty scheme considerably promotes rural households' engagement with waste sorting; (2) the more stringently the scheme is implemented, the higher the probabilities of more frequent sorting; and (3) point reward, which can be exchanged for vouchers used in local stores, is the most effective extrinsic incentive for promoting waste sorting. The findings provide insights for enhancing rural waste sorting in the developing world.