With the dramatic trend of global aging, the physical and mental health of the rural elderly has attracted significant attention. Social support plays an important role in improving the health of the elderly. However, assessing the impact of social support on the physical and mental health of the elderly is challenging in rural China. This paper analyzes the impact of social support on the physical and mental health of the Chinese rural elderly based on data collected from households and village cadres. Probit, Oprobit, and ordinary least squares (OLS) are used to estimate these effects. The results show that 24.3% of the rural elderly are in bad physical health, and 32.9% of them are depressed. Physical and mental health is worse among the female elderly and among those who are in western provinces. Having pensions, taking care of grandchildren, and communicating with children by telephone are shown to significantly improve the mental health of the rural elderly. The government could promote the mental health of the rural elderly by improving public health services, increasing pensions, providing free mobile phones to elderly people in poverty, and advocating that the younger generation provide emotional support.

China is undergoing a campaign which is called “The Targeted Poverty Alleviation Policy” to eradicate extreme poverty from rural China until 2020. Though poverty in rural China has been studied intensively in different objective dimensions, little attention has been paid to poverty line settings and subjective poverty, which are hinged to the policy effects. In order to fill in the research gap, this study employs a nationally representative survey of rural households in 2016, to measure subjective poverty in rural China, and analyze the determinants as well. Our results indicate that the mean subjective poverty line of the rural households is 8297 yuan per capita, which is far higher than the national poverty line (2800 yuan). Statistically, 29% of the surveyed rural households who are not objectively poor feel subjectively poor. The objective poverty line cannot fully reflect the subjective poverty perception. Thus, how to reduce the subjective poverty perception could be a major policy agenda in rural China after 2020, when extreme poverty is no longer a problem.

Despite mounting recognition of the essential role of women’s empowerment in household dietary and nutrition changes, the diversity of culture across African countries presents ambiguity as to whether its impact is experienced homogeneously across the continent. This article presents a systematic review of whether women’s empowerment changes household dietary patterns, contributes to nutrition improvement, and consequently affects diet-related health outcomes in Africa. We find that whilst more research needs to be conducted, particularly with improved methodologies that can establish cause–effect relationships, there is consensus among the literature on the link between women’s empowerment and some domains of food security and dietary improvement. Meanwhile, studies on women’s empowerment and the additional demand pressure on some food categories are quite limited. This exacerbates the challenge of setting production plans that aim to address the continent’s question of food.

This paper sheds light on how the growing number of off-farm employees affects the labor allocation of female and male left-behind farmers in the Chinese agricultural sector. We find no direct effect of off-farm employment on left behind workers' total working time in farming, nor do we observe a gender difference in this respect. However, we do find that increasing off-farm work is associated with fewer days worked on staple crops, and in the harvesting and sales stages of the production process. Hiring labor and buying agricultural services also impact left behind workers' time allocation. Moreover, we find that in China, contrary to several other developing countries, there is no trend towards a feminization of agriculture, but rather a tendency in the reverse direction