The present study was carried out to identify the determinants of microcredit accessibility by rural women households and its impact on rural women empowerment in Bangladesh. A face-to-face survey was conducted during 2018, interviewing 300 women households in two locations in Bangladesh. Descriptive statistics and econometric modeling were used to achieve the objectives. The results of the study showed that the higher annual income inversely related with the accessibility to the microcredit program, whereas family size (P < 0.05) was positive and significantly influenced the accessibility to the microcredit program. The empirical results indicate that borrowers of microcredit have greater control over their own savings. The regression outcome also exposes that microcredit has a positive and significant impact on enhancing participation in household decision making process and women’s legal awareness. The study suggested that microcredit providers in Bangladesh should be encouraged to review their program planning and redesign loan products by putting more emphasis on higher income group women.

Can the backward endowments of rural areas support digital village construction to attain the expected results? If the answer is yes, what are the mechanisms involved? Answering these questions is related to common prosperity. Counties are China’s frontline commanders, and the urban–rural income gap is a suitable entry point for observing the urban–rural digital divide; however, there is limited research assessing the effectiveness of digital village construction from the perspective of the urban–rural income gap at the county level. In addition, counties lifted out of poverty, as counties with worse initial endowments and as counties that should be most concerned with common wealth, are more typical for examining the effectiveness of digital rural construction; however, there are few studies on counties lifted out of poverty. Based on cross-sectional data from 865 counties in China in 2020, this study empirically analyzes the impact of digital village construction on the urban–rural income gap using an OLS model. This study also conducts mechanism tests and poverty benefit tests in addition to heterogeneity and robustness tests. The findings indicate that the development of digital villages lowers the income difference between urban and rural areas, and that the shift in the industrial structure is a key driver of this effect. Different construction dimensions have varying degrees of impact, with digital infrastructure and the digitalization of the economy having the most significant impact, the digitalization of countryside governance coming second, and the digitalization of countryside life having the most negligible impact. The impact is more pronounced in the central-eastern region of China and counties that have just been lifted out of poverty than in the western region and counties that have never been in poverty. The government will benefit greatly from this study’s understanding of the main themes, areas, and scope of digital rural construction, which will help to expand and further integrate the outcomes of reducing poverty and fostering shared prosperity.

Under the background of relatively slow agricultural labor transfer and land circulation, agricultural production outsourcing has become the main means of agricultural modernization. In order to provide a beneficial perspective for appropriately expanding the scale of rice control outsourcing services, we investigated the situation of rice control outsourcing in ten counties of Fujian Province, and analyzed the factors influencing rice farmers’ decision-making and control degree by using Heckman model. First of all, the main factors affecting farmers’ participation in outsourcing are agricultural labor force, whether family members are cooperative members, planting area, proportion of grain income, degree of organization of outsourcing team, region and so on. Secondly, agricultural labor force, cooperative members, planting area, part-time behavior, mechanical efficiency of prevention and control organization, and region are the main factors affecting the scale of control outsourcing. Thirdly, from a regional perspective, the rice farmers in northern and Western Fujian are more dependent on outsourcing services consumption compared with the rice farmers in Southern Fujian. These results have a clear impact on policymakers, indicating that policy and measures should encourage the prevention and control of the nature of cooperation, and improve the advanced nature of outsourcing facilities of plant protection equipment, thereby effectively improving the professional level of rice pest and disease control.

This research offers a theoretical model to measure the impact of social media usage on social capital in the agricultural system of China. Furthermore, this research also investigates the relationship between agricultural policies related to entrepreneurship training and social media usage. A total of 589 questionnaires were distributed in the training courses of Fujian Agricultural Vocational Technology College, and, Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Jianning, and Liancheng counties and cities in Fujian during winter and summer vacations to target new vocational farmers. The results show that social use, hedonic use, and cognitive use of social media significantly impacted both bridging and bonding social capital. Furthermore, the results of the study suggest that entrepreneurs who have participated in the training have significantly higher levels of social use and cognitive use than those who have not been trained. The findings of this paper have implications for the digital transformation by agricultural entrepreneurs in recognition of the role of sustainable education and learning in entrepreneurial activities and the utilization of social and cognitive functions of social media to acquire and accumulate social capital and provide support for sustainable agriculture and rural development. Furthermore, the concepts of sustainability-driven agriculture in the digital transformational framework were also studied and it was indicated that transformed agriculture can effectively deal with the present challenges.

As agriculture is becoming a less reliable source of income, many farmers are turning to other industries to supplement their lackluster profits from farming in a process known as farmers’ livelihood differentiation. Despite the existence of a voluminous literature on farmers’ livelihood differentiation, little is known about its effect on agricultural production behavior. To fill this knowledge gap, this study uses rice planting data from 537 Chinese farm households to analyze how farmers’ livelihood differentiation affects pesticide application among rural farmers in China. This study not only examines the effects of farmers’ livelihood differentiation on farmers’ pesticide application, but also underscores the potential pathways behind the effects of farmers’ livelihood differentiation according to land resource endowment via a causal mediation analysis. The results showed that (1) farmers’ livelihood differentiation had a direct effect on the amount of pesticide use. Compared to the full-time agricultural households, regular part-time farmers and ir-regular part-time farmers generally tend to use lower levels of pesticides. (2) The mediating effect of farmers’ livelihood differentiation on pesticide use was through land resource endowment. Compared to the full-time agricultural households, ir-regular part-time farmers reduce their pesticide use through maintaining better land resource endowment, while regular part-time farmers increase their pesticide application by maintaining poor land resource endowment. These results may provide important implications for policymakers to improve cultivated land protection policies and encourage the use of soil testing technology to determine the formulation of the fertilizer used in the agricultural ecological environment.