Welfare services such as healthcare, elderly care, and education are key to ensuring quality of life generally, and vital for rural communities across urbanizing countries. While these sectors are largely tax-financed, several countries have established quasi-markets to achieve competition...

We show that mobile connectivity transforms household livelihoods in ways that foster food market integration in WAEMU countries. Using cross-sectional data on nearly 60,000 households and 146 food products traded across 5,000 enumeration areas in eight member states (2018-2019), we combine...

How do institutional barriers to migration shape fertility in developing economies? We analyze the staggered removal of institutional barriers to rural-to-urban migration across 283 Chinese cities. We find that reducing these frictions led to a significant and persistent increase in fertility in...

This study examines the role of financial infrastructure in shaping child health outcomes in rural India, with a particular focus on whether access to rural banking mitigates the adverse effects of agricultural income shocks. Using data from the National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS), I...

The study provides some fresh insights into the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) framework in Bukhara and Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan. The findings confirm that loss in production, soil erosion, deforestation, decreasing arable land, salinization, and water management are the most prevailing...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the drivers and barriers to broadband adoption/use by food and drink micro-business owner-managers based in remote-rural Scotland. This study adopts a mixed methods approach consisting of 141 questionnaires involving rural restaurants, which is then...

Sustainable territorial development seeks to balance economic growth, social well-being, and environmental preservation across spatial contexts. In fragile and resource-constrained regions, achieving this balance remains particularly challenging. With the growing diffusion of artificial...

As a fundamental tenet of socialism with Chinese characteristics, pursuing common prosperity for all entails reducing urban-rural disparities while simultaneously increasing rural household income. This study utilizes interview and survey data from the "Chinese Thousand Villages Survey"...

The reallocation of production factors, particularly labor, is central to understanding economic development and household welfare. This paper investigates how the transfer of farmland, a fundamental shift in factor endowment, affects rural household financial vulnerability, with a specific...

This paper leverages quasi-experimental variation from store openings and 1.5 billion grocery transactions to causally estimate the distance elasticity of grocery expenditures (−1.47) and the spatial extent of local consumption areas (approximately 16 minutes of car travel time). We embed...

We study optimal housing taxation in a Mirrleesian framework where individuals differ in both labor productivity and land ownership. Housing services are produced by combining scarce land with structures that require maintenance, which can be performed either in-house or through market...

Exposure to extreme weather events and other adverse shocks has led to an increasing number of humanitarian crises in developing countries in recent years. These events cause acute suffering and compromise future welfare by adversely impacting human capital formation among vulnerable...

Rural roads, serving as vital links between remote areas and economic centers, play an indispensable role in rural development. This paper investigates the relationship between rural road development and various economic outcomes in China from 2008 to 2021. Based on comprehensive novel road...

This paper estimates the direct and indirect effects of agriculture on health and nutrition using nationally representative survey data collected by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in 1994, 1997, 2005 and 2015. The models estimated serve as examples of general frameworks that can be used...

The close relationship between tourism and transportation in the context of sustainable mobility development and increased environmental and sustainability policies is widely debated in the scientific literature. The Romanian railway transport system may represent an ignored opportunity that is...

Rural electrification plays a crucial role in improving the socioeconomic conditions of underserved communities by enabling extended productive hours, enhancing access to education, and empowering women. However, conventional grid extension is often economically unfeasible for remote areas due...

The concept of multi-local living is a current and growing phenomenon in Nordic countries and elsewhere. However, the changes that multi-local causes in the temporal recreational activity of areas have remained unknown because official population statistics are not capable of detecting the...

The Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas (LTVRA) pointed out that rural areas require an appropriate form of governance to avoid fragmentation and ensure the integration of rural policies. Recently, Italian law stressed the importance of Food Districts (FDs), including Rural Districts (RDs), to cope...

Taking the case of rural South India, we explore the universality of the Big Five personality traits and their stability over time. We then investigate the effects of two exogenous shocks on trait stability: the demonetisation of November 2016 and the second COVID-19 lockdown. We use an original...

Tourism-oriented livelihoods represent a significant avenue for transforming traditional agricultural practices. Analyzing their environmental impacts offers a novel perspective for exploring the complex interplay among human production, consumption, and the ecological environment at a micro...

Women entrepreneurs in rural South Africa face structural and socio-cultural barriers in accessing funding. This study investigated how existing financial structures and support programs influence the sustainability and growth of female-owned businesses in rural areas. Using bibliometric...

Administrative digital accessibility drives rural development, particularly in peri-urban areas where traditional governance meets the growing demands for digital services. The study examines the role of digital tools in local administrations in supporting citizen engagement and responsiveness...

The rapid popularization of digital technology is profoundly altering the employment landscape; especially in rural areas, the digital economy has opened up unprecedented channels to narrow the gender gap in non-agricultural employment. This study utilizes data from the China Family Panel Studies...

Mental health conditions are strongly associated with reduced labor market participation, but the underlying channels through which such conditions impact labor supply remain unclear. This paper reports on a two-phase study decomposing this relationship by examining (i) job take-up decisions;...

India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), enacted in 2005, is an experiment of major significance. Drawing on official statistics, this paper presents a broad-brush retrospective on MGNREGA's first 20 years, focusing inter alia on employment generation, the...