This study explores climate change's symmetric and asymmetric impacts on rice production in Sri Lanka, a crucial sector for food security in the country. The analysis utilized Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) models. This study analyses annual data from 1952 to 2022 to capture relationships among the study variables. The ARDL findings reveal that temperature and cultivated land area have a significant long-term effect on rice production. The NARDL model reveals that positive and negative changes in climate variables have asymmetrical long-term impacts. Positive changes in temperature and rainfall lead to a notable decline in rice yields in the long term. Negative rainfall changes create a significant beneficial effect on rice production in the long term. Cultivated land area shows a significant positive impact on rice yield in the long term. The results of symmetric and asymmetric climate change impact are essential for formulating agricultural climate adaptation policies, such as promoting climate resilience rice varieties, improving irrigation and water management, developing early warning systems that promote sustainability and enhance climate adaptation strategies, ensuring food security in Sri Lanka.

Using a panel dataset of 24,527 farming households from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) for the years 2014–2020, this study employed the fixed-effects, mediation-effect, and two-stage least squares (2SLS) models to explore why in the context of non-agricultural employment Chinese farmers are reluctant to lease out their land from an agricultural mechanization perspective. The analysis yielded several significant findings. First, participation in non-agricultural employment significantly increases the likelihood of farmers leasing out their land. Second, remittances do not significantly impact the increase in agricultural machinery procurement investments but increase expenditures on agricultural machinery leasing. Third, both pathways of agricultural mechanization—self-purchased machinery and machinery leasing—significantly inhibit farmers from leasing out land, indicating a negative mediating effect of agricultural mechanization on the impact of non-agricultural employment on land leasing. Fourth, a complementary rather than a substitutive effect exists between self-purchased and leased agricultural machinery. Collectively, the findings suggest that the government should increase agricultural machinery subsidies to advance the process of agricultural mechanization in China, which plays a crucial compensatory role in the loss of rural labor. Furthermore, improving the wages, benefits, and employment stability of migrant workers is significantly conducive to promoting and stabilizing land transfers.

Internet technology has unique advantages, such as rich information, rapid dissemination, and overcoming spatial limitations. It is considered an effective approach to promote agricultural technology application and enhance agricultural technical efficiency. However, it is still unclear how Internet use affects the technical efficiency of smallholders in grain production. Based on the grain production data of 1699 smallholders in China, this study uses the bias-corrected stochastic production frontier and propensity score matching to obtain an unbiased estimate of the impact of Internet use on technical efficiency and examines its channels of action. The empirical results indicate that the decision of households to use the Internet is influenced by the individual characteristics of the household head, household characteristics, and village characteristics. The age of the household head has a significant negative impact on Internet use, while the education level and health status of the household head, household income and size, and the topography of the village have significant positive effects on Internet use. We also find that Internet use has a statistically significant positive effect on technical efficiency, and the selection bias leads us to underestimate this effect. Furthermore, we verified the channels of Internet use affect technical efficiency by alleviating financial constraints, broadening social capital, and improving the level of mechanization. Therefore, policymakers must strengthen the construction of Internet infrastructure in rural areas and improve the Internet penetration rate in rural areas. Furthermore, policymakers can establish technical training centers to help farmers learn Internet technology and new agricultural production techniques. Lastly, policymakers can collaborate with banks, research institutions, cooperatives, agricultural enterprises, and other entities to develop diverse policy measures that provide farmers with financial support, technology assistance, and production services.

Understanding the factors affecting irrigation management performance is crucial for sustainable resource use, especially with the decentralized management mode of irrigation systems being implemented in rural China. This paper contributes to the research field by incorporating different categories of social trust and perceived organization support (POS) into the analysis of irrigation management performance, by linking multiple elements that are based on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. We employed principal component analysis (PCA) and ordered probit regression to analyze a database covering 785 households in the upstream of the Yellow River basin. The results suggested that social trust and POS positively affected the irrigation management performance, and social trust strengthened the positive effect of POS on the performance. Furthermore, the results indicated that personal trust and institutional trust, as well as perceived emotional support and physical support, positively affected the performance. In addition, we also found that household characteristics, household cognition, group characteristics, physical conditions, and rules-in-use also had significant impact on the performance. This paper can be used to inform the government that social trust and POS need to be considered in the common-pool resources (CPRs) management.