While there is a large body of literature on the negative health effects of air pollution, there is much less written about its effects on cognitive performance for the whole population. This paper studies the effects of contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance based on a nationally representative survey in China. By merging a longitudinal sample at the individual level with local air-quality data according to the exact dates and counties of interviews, we find that contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution impedes both verbal and math scores of survey subjects. Interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for men than for women. Specifically, the gender difference is more salient among the old and less educated in both verbal and math tests.

Adoption of quality-enhancing technologies is often driven largely by farmers’ expected returns from these technologies. Without proper grades, standards, and certification systems, however, farmers may remain uncertain about the actual financial return associated with their quality-enhancing investments. This report summarizes the outcomes of a short video-based randomized training intervention on wheat quality measurement and collective marketing among 15,000 wheat farmers in Ethiopia. Our results suggest that the intervention led to significant changes in farmers’ commercialization behaviors—namely, it prompted farmers to adopt behaviors geared toward assessing their wheat’s quality using easily implementable test-weight measures, assessing the accuracy of the equipment used by buyers in their kebeles (scales, in particular), and contacting more than one buyer before concluding a sale. The training also led to improvements in share of output sold, price received, and collective marketing, albeit with important limitations. First, farmers who measured their wheat quality received a higher price, but only if their wheat was of higher quality. Second, farmers who found that their wheat was of higher quality were more reluctant to aggregate their wheat (that is, sell their products through local cooperatives) than those who found that their wheat was of lower quality. Lastly, the training intervention led to better use of fertilizer in the following season. Our discovery that a short training intervention can significantly change farmers’ marketing and production behavior should encourage the development of further interventions aimed at enhancing farmers’ adoption of improved technologies and commercialization.

The high level of inequality in China has been a focus of interest for policy makers and researchers. However, few studies have evaluated the trend since 2010. With changes in the economic structure and new policy tools introduced in recent years, a revisit of Chinese inequality should give us the latest information about its evolution and the impacts of these economic and policy changes on income distribution. This paper argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and even turning down. The argument is made using a range of data sources and a range of measures and perspectives on inequality. The evolution of inequality is further examined through decomposition by income source and population subgroup. Some preliminary explanations are provided for these trends in terms of shifts in policy and the structural transformation of the Chinese economy. The narrative on Chinese inequality now needs to focus on the reasons for this great turnaround.

At a time when donors and governments are increasing efforts to mainstream gender in agriculture, it is critical to revisit long-standing wisdom about gender inequalities in agriculture to be able to more efficiently design and evaluate policy interventions. Many stylized facts about women in agriculture have been repeated for decades. Did nothing really change? Is some of this conventional wisdom simply maintained over time, or has it always been inaccurate? We use longitudinal data from Ghana to assess some of the facts and to evaluate whether gender patterns have changed over time. We focus on five main themes: land, cropping patterns, market participation, agricultural inputs, and employment. We add to the literature by showing new facts and evidence from more than 20 years. Results are varied and highlight the difficulty of making general statements about gender in agriculture.

Policy making in food security is at a crossroads in India, particularly for the rice crop. Whereas India has emerged has a leading rice exporter over the last two years, the government has also introduced a large food subsidy program called the National Food Security Act. The program requires that 33.6 million metric tons of rice per year be distributed to the marginalized rural and urban populations of the country. In this study, we analyze the long-term impact of India’s Food Security Act on its domestic rice market and the international market for rice. We specify and apply a structural demand-and-supply model to India’s rice market and link it with the world rice market, as part of a broad partial equilibrium modeling system of international agriculture commodity markets. We specifically focus on three different scenarios—subsidy as a price effect, subsidy as an inelastic income effect, and subsidy as an elastic income effect—under the broader framework of the National Food Security Act. We find that at the end of the projection period (the 2024/2025 crop year), as a result of the rice subsidy program, the consumption of rice increases significantly by 6,831 thousand metric ton (MT) in the case of the price effect while the inelastic income effect has little on production, consumption which increase by 265 thousand MT and 269 thousand MT, respectively and no impact on rice export of India.

In the face of increasing environmental stresses, there is a critical need to improve water-use efficiency in many arid and semiarid agroclimatic zones. Drip irrigation is a high-efficiency irrigation technology that can improve water-use efficiency in currently irrigated areas and transform areas that are not otherwise irrigable in practice. Although adoption of drip irrigation is growing rapidly in India, adoption is low in neighboring Pakistan. The authors of this paper undertook a discrete choice experiment framed around the hypothetical subsidized purchase of a drip irrigation system in four districts of Punjab, Pakistan. The nonrepresentative sample of adopters and nonadopters in the study districts identified a clear increase in the valuation of drip systems in the first several years following adoption. This finding suggests that farmers may be unaware of the opportunities for the use of drip irrigation on their farms or the benefits that may accrue from such use. In addition, farmers’ aspirations for cropping systems under drip were better predictors of the valuation of drip systems than were current cropping patterns, implying that a different agricultural landscape might reasonably emerge under improved adoption of drip. Aspirations differed across the different agroecological zones and water regimes captured by this study. Aspirations to substitute wheat crops for fruits and vegetables were associated with a higher appreciation of the subsidy level, whereas aspirations to expand wheat were associated with a higher appreciation of the area covered by the drip initiative; together, these findings imply a degree of control over the extent of wheat production in the landscape via careful design of the drip subsidy program. Although the penetration of drip irrigation is not yet sufficient to draw inferences from a representative sample, these results suggest a number of ways in which drip irrigation may transform Pakistan’s agricultural landscape

The purpose of this report is to provide information and analysis to government, civil society, and donors interested in improving the well-being of the rural population of Mon State, Myanmar. Specifically, the report analyzes the different sources of income for rural households, as well as their socioeconomic characteristics, with a view to helping identify constraints on growth and potential pathways to improving incomes. The overall picture that emerges is one of a struggling agricultural sector and an economy heavily dependent on services for local employment and on international migration for income. The analysis is based on a sample of 1,632 rural households, designed to be representative of rural households in Mon State as a whole. The survey included a household questionnaire and a community survey, and gathered information on demographics, all economic aspects of the household, and access to infrastructure and services at the community level.