Residential energy expenditures and the relevance of financial inclusion across location, wealth quintiles and household structures.

This paper examines the relative role of financial inclusion in enhancing households' ability to spend on energy consumption across rural and urban locations. It uses comprehensive household data from Ghana and employs the ordinary least square (OLS) as well as an instrumental variable estimation technique. Endogeneity of financial inclusion is instrumented using distance to the nearest bank. Our findings suggest that a standard deviation increase in financial inclusion contributes to an improvement in residential energy expenditure by 1.2835 standard deviations. This finding is robust to different methods for resolving endogeneity and alternative weighting schemes in the financial inclusion construct. Among the different sources of energy for lighting and cooking, financial inclusion increases expenditure on LPG and electricity more than the others. Financial inclusion increases the ability to spend more on residential energy in urban, poorest, and female-headed dual-parent households. Household net income is a key pathway through which financial inclusion affects residential energy expenditure.

Do disclosure of ESG information policies inhibit the value of heavily polluting Enterprises?-Evidence from China.

Green governance and high-quality green development are crucial to the growth of enterprises; therefore, this paper examines how environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) disclosure policies affect the value of heavily polluting companies. The study's data is from the new version of the Governance Guidelines for Public Companies promulgated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in 2018. Thus, the data of China's public companies from 2011 to 2021 is used for the study's analysis. The methods applied for our estimation analysis are the differences-in-differences (DID) and the mediation effect model. The findings depict that ESG information disclosure policies can significantly inhibit the corporate value of heavily polluting enterprises (HPE). Enterprise technological innovation plays a mediating effect in this mechanism; that is, after introducing the policy, it effectively alleviates the information asymmetry and promotes enterprise technological innovation, but it also damages the enterprise value. Further analysis shows that the inhibition effect of ESG information disclosure policy on the value of HPE is heterogeneous, and for non-state-owned enterprises, ESG information disclosure policies have a stronger inhibitory effect. Also, there is little difference between the central and western regions and the eastern region in terms of the inhibitory effect of ESG disclosure policies on the value of HPE. The conclusion of this paper is conducive to improving the information disclosure policy of listed companies and promoting the green development of enterprises.

Assessing financial literacy and food and nutritional security relationship in an African country.

This study investigates the relationship between rural Ghanaian household food and nutrition security and financial literacy. We used the endogenous treatment regression (ETR) technique to address the analysis's potential selection bias problem. The findings of our study demonstrated a beneficial relationship between food and nutrition security and financial literacy. According to further studies, the relationship between food security and financial literacy is heterogeneous. Our findings may have some ramifications for promoting food and nutritional security while preserving rural development methods.

The Relationship between Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases of Fish Farm Household Members and Production Efficiency: The Case of Ghana.

Prior studies explored the production and technical efficiency of fish farms and farmers from the perspectives of factors such as credit access and cooperative membership. We focused on the chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) of household members and their quantitative impacts on fish farm production efficiency, based on data of earthen pond fish farms from two regions (Bono East and Ashanti) in Ghana. A data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the IV Tobit technique were employed for the study's analysis. From the study's observations, we draw the following conclusions. We found that the NCDs of household members indeed reduce farm production efficiency, and the heterogeneous impact of the NCDs of female members on farm production efficiency was more prominent than that of male members. Insights from this study suggest that the national government should provide farmers with the necessary medical care through the provision of subsidized health insurance, which can facilitate access to healthcare services. Moreover, NGOs and governments should encourage health literacy, i.e., organizing programs aimed at educating farmers on NCDs and their impact on agriculture.

Impact of Agricultural Mechanization Level on Farmers' Health Status in Western China: Analysis Based on CHARLS Data.

Agricultural mechanization is an important component of agricultural modernization, as it contributes to the improvement of agricultural technology and the rapid transformation of agricultural development. However, research on the connection between agricultural mechanization and farmers' health status is scarce. Thus, using the 2018 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) data, this study explored how agricultural mechanization can affect farmers' health. OLS and 2SLS models were used for the study's analysis. Furthermore, we used a PSM model to check the robustness of our analysis. The findings showed that: (1) the current state of agricultural mechanization in western China harms the health of rural residents; (2) agricultural mechanization can mitigate the adverse effects on health by increasing farmers' living expenditure and improving their living environment; and (3) agricultural mechanization's effects on farmers' health are regionally and income-heterogeneous. Agricultural mechanization has a more significant impact on health in Tibetan areas and high-income regions. It has an almost minimal effect in non-Tibetan and low-income areas. This paper suggests approaches that can be used to encourage the rational development of agricultural mechanization and improve rural populations' health.

Measuring the Effects of Climate Change on Wheat Production: Evidence from Northern China.

The current study examines the long-run effects of climatic factors on wheat production in China's top three wheat-producing provinces (Hebei, Henan, and Shandong). The data set consists of observations from 1992 to 2020 on which several techniques, namely, fully modified OLS (FMOLS), dynamic OLS (DOLS), and canonical co-integrating regression (CCR) estimators, and Granger causality, are applied. The results reveal that climatic factors, such as temperature and rainfall, negatively influenced wheat production in Henan Province. This means that Henan Province is more vulnerable to climate change. In contrast, it is observed that climatic conditions (via temperature and rainfall) positively contributed to wheat production in Hebei Province. Moreover, temperature negatively influenced wheat production in Shandong Province, while rainfall contributed positively to wheat production. Further, the results of Granger causality reveal that climatic factors and other determinants significantly influenced wheat production in the selected provinces.

Modeling the Impact of Climatological Factors and Technological Revolution on Soybean Yield: Evidence from 13-Major Provinces of China.

In recent years, the changing climate has become a major global concern, and it poses a higher threat to the agricultural sector around the world. Consequently, this study examines the impact of changing climate and technological progress on soybean yield in the 13 major provinces of China, and considers the role of agricultural credit, farming size, public investment, and power of agricultural machinery from 2000 to 2020. Fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) are applied to assess the long-run effect, while Dumitrescu and Hurlin's (2012) causality test is used to explore the short-run causalities among the studied variables. The results revealed that an increase in the annual mean temperature negatively and significantly affects soybean yield, while precipitation expressively helps augment soybean yield. Furthermore, technological factors such as chemical fertilizers accelerate soybean yield significantly, whereas pesticides negatively influence soybean yield. In addition, farming size, public investment, and power of agricultural machinery contribute remarkably to soybean yield. The causality results endorse that chemical fertilizers, pesticides used, agricultural credit, public investment, and power of agricultural machinery have bidirectional causality links with soybean yield. This study suggests several fruitful policy implications for sustainable soybean production in China.

Effects of Intergenerational Care Behavior on Residents' Nutrition Intake-Descriptive Statistical Analysis of Rural China Survey 2010-2014.

Nutritional status plays an indispensable role in enhancing human capital and preventing the return to poverty. In the context of the three-child policy and the aging society in China, intergenerational care will inevitably become a core component of family support. Thus, this paper evaluates the impacts of intergenerational care behavior on nutritional intake in Chinese rural residents from the perspective of household consumption. The study's data is from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) (2010-2014), and, the fixed effect model and analyses are applied to achieve the study's objective. The results reveal that rural residents with intergenerational family care behavior have significantly higher food diversity. Thus, Chinese rural residents with intergenerational care consumed 22.4% more food. A possible mechanism is that intergenerational care improves young mothers' labor participation and income, thus optimizing their dietary structure. Moreover, there was heterogeneity concerning the nutrition intake among rural residents in different geographic and family net income groups. Finally, the robust check is consistent with the baseline regression results. In summary, governments should fully affirm the elderly contribution to families to give full play to the elderly family benefit maximization.

The impact of climate change coping and adaptation strategies on livestock farmers' technical efficiency: the case of rural Ghana.

Compared with developed nations, developing countries are more vulnerable to climate change and variability. In this study, a coping and adaptation strategies (CCCAs) index, data envelopment analysis (DEA), and fractional regression model (FRM) are used to explore the impact of farmers' CCCAs on technical efficiency (TE) among goat farmers in Ghana. Using survey data collected from goat farmers in the northern part of Ghana, the results reveal the following: first, most of the farmers were inefficient in their production. Thus, out of the 124 goat farmers, only 13 (10.5%), 3 (2.4%), and 4 (3.2%) were efficient under variable return to scale (VRS), constant returns to scale (CRS), and scale efficiency (SE), respectively. Second, regarding a quantitative relationship, CCCAs can help increase farmer' efficiency. Again CCCAs impact on female farmers' TE was profound than their counterparts. Finally, CCCAs have heterogeneous impacts on goat farmers in different groups. Our findings provide policy implications to improve CCCAs and enhance the goat farmers' TE.