We use the rollout of a large-scale land certification program in Mexico from 1993 to 2006 to study how rural reforms establishing secure property rights determine patterns of migration, relocation of economic activity, and structural transformation. We find that certification leads higher-skilled agricultural labor to migrate, leaving behind economies less concentrated in agriculture, and with...

Selection of the best compromise irrigation plan is examined in the multi objective context. The study deals with three con ̄icting objectives: net bene®ts, agricultural production and labour employment. Three-stage procedure is adopted combining multi objective optimisation, cluster analysis and multicriterion decision-making (MCDM) methods. Two MCDM methods, namely, PROMETHEE-2 and a newly dev...

Landless agricultural laborers and marginal farmers constitute much of India’s poor. As population growth increases and more people enter an expanding rural labor force, either they must eke out a living in the rural sector or add to the growing pressure on the country’s urban areas. Meanwhile, agricultural jobs are fewer and the corresponding wages have been persistently below subsistence leve...

Continued industrialization in China and increase in its agricultural productivity imply that surplus rural workers will to be attracted into non-agricultural production activities and, consequently, will have the opportunity to increase their off-farm income. Studying the structure of the rural labor force and its characteristics is important for evaluating its migration potential into non-agr...

Agriculture is one of the major greenhouse gas (GHG) emission sources in China. This paper aims to identify the key factors that have led to rising GHG emissions in China’s agricultural sector in recent decades. This research allows for spatial dependence across provinces, making use of regional data from 31 provinces in mainland China. It investigates the effects of agricultural machinery, dif...

v AKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I would like to express my immense gratitude to my supervisors Marrit van den Berg and Adam Szirmai. Marrit van den Berg supported and helped me at all stages of a PhD marathon. I am very thankful that you agreed to be my supervisor without knowing me. You have been always ready to help and I could never imagine that it would be possible to receive answers to...