For a long time, the majority of China, which has the world’s largest population, has been immobile and lived in rural areas. However, over recent decades, with the economic rise of China, rural labor has demonstrated a trend of moving to rapidly industrializing regions in search of higher income and better employment opportunities. Along with the labor cutback, out-migration introduces negatives to the sustainable development of rural areas, i.e., depopulation, the abandonment of rural settlements and agricultural lands, and the aging of the population, among others. Due to the threats of labor outflow to sustainability, studying the causes of China’s rural out-migration can reveal lessons on how state policies can be designed to reduce the negative impacts of out-migration on rural communities. The purpose of this paper is to identify the major causes of migration movements among the rural areas of northern China that are considered to be the best-performing among the provinces of the country in terms of rural development, agricultural production, and the wealth of rural dwellers. A two-stage survey of a panel of experts involved: (1) respondents representing government officials and universities of the Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and (2) regional and district levels of administration, and research and public establishments of Heilongjiang Province. In stage three, drawing on the authors’ own survey of 128 rural households in three counties of Heilongjiang Province, the major migration drivers have been identified, and the portfolio of a typical rural migrant has been developed. Some of the key findings are that migration intentions are fueled by the rural–urban income gap, poverty, a reduction of demand for labor in rural areas, underdeveloped infrastructure, the low quality of social services in rural settlements, and the low social standing of rural dwellers. The approach allows monitoring the dynamics of migration attitudes as responses to the policy interventions that are aimed at the sustainable development of rural areas.

Over the past decades, both the quantity and quality of food supply for millions of people have improved substantially in the course of economic growth across the developing world. However, the number of undernourished people has resumed growth in the 2010s amid food supply disruptions, economic slowdowns, and protectionist restrictions to agricultural trade. Having been common to most nations, these challenges to the food security status of the population still vary depending on the level of economic development and national income of individual countries. In order to explore the long-run determinants of food supply transformations, this study employs five-stage multiple regression analysis to identify the strengths and directions of effects of agricultural production parameters, income level, price indices, food trade, and currency exchange on supply of calories, proteins, and fats across 11 groups of agricultural products in 1980–2018. To address the diversity of effects across developing nations, the study includes 99 countries of Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa categorized as low-income, lower-middle-income, and upper-middle-income economies. It is found that in low-income countries, food supply parameters are more strongly affected by production factors compared to economic and trade variables. The effect of economic factors on the food supply of higher-value food products, such as meat and dairy products, fruit, and vegetables, increases with the rise in the level of income, but it stays marginal for staples in all three groups of countries. The influence of trade factors on food supply is stronger compared to production and economic parameters in import-dependent economies irrelevant of the gross national income per capita. The approach presented in this paper contributes to the research on how food supply patterns and their determinants evolve in the course of economic transformations in low-income countries.

Combating poverty through the development of agricultural production and providing rural people with new employment and income opportunities in agriculture has become one of the major concerns of both policymakers and scholars worldwide. In many developing countries, government policies have failed to achieve the desired poverty alleviation goals due to the lack of financial resources. Despite that, few comprehensive studies have so far unambiguously identified the effects of the exogenous factor of capital inflows on the level of poverty and agriculture development. In this paper, the authors attempt to shed light on the poverty–agriculture–capital trilemma pattern by revealing the impacts of different types of capital inflows on the parameters of poverty reduction and agriculture development. The panel unit root test and pool mean group estimation techniques were employed for observing the short-term and long-term linkages between dependent and explanatory variables across fourteen developing economies of Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. It was revealed that poverty reduction could be positively affected by an increase in the values of agricultural exports, foreign direct investment, foreign development assistance, and remittances received from migrant workers. The level of agriculture could be improved by deeper integration of developing economies to global food supply chains as either suppliers or consumers of food and agricultural products.

The volatility of both global and national markets has emerged in recent years. In response to the changes in the operating environment, organizations have been adopting various practices to ensure sustainable development by anticipating threats and managing risks. While many studies are focusing on the investigation of strategic adaptation to the volatile economic environment, there has been little research examining management accounting (MA) as a sustainable development strategy in times of economic turbulence. This study investigates the degree of variation in the use of MA practices induced by economic recession. Investigating the variations in management accounting practices in Russian organizations in 2000–2013 (pre-recession period) and 2014–2018 (economic recession), the authors explore the change across 54 MA tools split into operation, management, and strategy pillars. The contribution of this study to the literature involves the understanding of the use of particular MA tools across various types of organizations and industries before and during the economic recession, as well as discovering the intention to change the instruments in case the economic situation deteriorates. The survey of four types of organizations (micro, small, medium, and large) in five sectors (service, industry, trade, agriculture, and tourism) was conducted in seven territories of Russia differentiated on the level of their economic performance (well-performing, average, and declining). The survey revealed that, during the crisis, the respondents tend to drop using many of proactive sustainability-oriented MA tools and instead focused on achieving immediate and direct effects on sales, profits, and other performance parameters by employing less-sophisticated short-term MA instruments. The forecast of future application of MA tools in a falling economy revealed that, in an attempt to achieve durable and sustainable performance, the organizations of all types and sectors intended to focus on practices such as risk management variance analysis, rolling forecasts, payback, breakeven analysis, and activity-based management.

For decades, agriculture has been central to economic growth and development in Pakistan. However, endemic rural poverty hinders the performance of agricultural production, and thus deteriorates the sustainable development perspectives of the agricultural sector and the entire country. The need for agricultural reform emphasizes raising farmers’ incomes as a cornerstone of the sustainable development of rural areas, and this study attempts to reveal the effects of foreign aid and government policies on the level of rural poverty in Pakistan. In total, 384 farmers from major agricultural areas of Pakistan completed the survey-based questionnaire. The partial least square structural equation modelling technique tested the results. They, using sustainable agriculture practices, improved agricultural production positively and significantly. Agriculture production positively and significantly reduces or mitigates poverty. This study aimed to reveal the role of foreign aid in sustaining agricultural production and eradicating rural poverty. Foreign aid positively moderated the association between sustainable agriculture practices and agricultural production. In addition, government policies negatively, yet insignificantly, moderate the association between agriculture production and poverty reduction. Furthermore, the findings indicate that agriculture production positively and significantly mediates the association between sustainable agriculture practices and poverty reduction. The study contributes to the literature by improving the understanding of linkages within the poverty-policies-aid-sustainability framework.

Fisheries has always played a vital role in supporting livelihoods and ensuring food security and sustainable economic and social development in Southeast Asia. Historically, rural and coastal communities across the region have heavily relied on the fish trade as an indispensable source of income and employment. With the establishment of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) between Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies and large fish traders like China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, there is a threat for smaller countries to lose competitive advantages in the regional market. By studying bilateral trade flows between fifteen RCEP members in 2010–2019 and matching indicative untapped trade potentials (ITP method) with revealed comparative (RCA method), relative trade (RTA method), and competitive (Lafay index) advantages across 210 pairs of countries, the authors found substantial misbalances between potential values of country-to-country trade and actual advantages of RCEP economies. To optimize gains from intraregional trade for both smaller and larger RCEP members, this study identified advantageous and disadvantageous trading destinations and product categories for individual countries. The recommendations were then generalized along the four groups of economies based on their level of income, contribution to overall RCEP trade in fish, and the share of fishery products in the national trade turnover. From a practical side, the study adds to the knowledge about the fish trade in Asia by detailing how countries can better utilize individual combinations of advantages. From a methodological side, the approach can be employed widely outside the RCEP to establish a reliable picture of potential gains or losses of a particular country in trade with its counterparts across varied sets of competitive advantages.