Business and Economics Journal

There are limited empirical studies that explore how agricultural extension services and local institutions influence conservation agriculture adoption and household food security. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the potential impacts of extension services and local institutions (social capital) on conservation agriculture and food security. A cross-sectional data is collected from 350 randomly selected farmers in northern Ethiopia. The propensity matching method and endogenous switching regression are used to control for selection bias from observed and unobserved factors. Results indicate that extension services and social capital have significant and positive effects on adopting conservation agriculture and improving household food security. Farmers under the treated groups have higher per capita food consumption, per capita expenditure and food security levels than counterpart farmers. Besides, the rate of adoption of conservation agriculture for the treated farmers is relatively higher than for other farmers. This confirms that extension services, formal institutions and informal groups have motivated farmers to adopt conservation agriculture and replenish risks of food insecurity shocks. Therefore, governments, researchers, academicians, NGOs, development practitioners and others actors should exert utmost efforts and investments to empower local institutions and strength agricultural extension services, which are viable options to stimulate farmers to adopt sustainable agriculture in drought-prone areas of the country.

The rapid development of the creative industry, particularly the mobile gaming industry, has attracted increasing academic attention across different fields as the digitalization era has arrived. Chinese firms, such as Tencent, have become too big to be ignored. Apart from the International Business (IB) studies, the authors of the article “Market Expansion of Domestic Gaming Firms in Shenzhen, China: Dilemma of Globalization and Regionalization” took an institutional approach to look into how multi-scalar institutions in Shenzhen, China have impacted the development path of the industry. By connecting the concept of Global Production Network (GPN) and the ideas of technological and market gaps in the market expansion of the creative industry, the authors argued that while the protective multi-scalar institutional environment helped the emergence and dominance of the Chinese gaming firms in the domestic market, the firms have been still struggled to expand the market globally. Through this commentary, the importance of the multi-scalar institutional settings, the extra-regional assets, and the marketing capability in the development and expansion of an industry, which has been sometimes understudied, will be introduced and discussed.

The main question this article seeks to address is how the BLM’s bureaucratic autonomy is affected by deep ideological divides over public lands management policy. Daniel Carpenter’s (2001) theory of bureaucratic autonomy serves to provide the definition and method for evaluating the research question. The case study identifies that the bureaucratic autonomy afforded is intrinsically bound to interest group politics. There exists little room for initiative not supported by specific interests. Actions required by the multiple use mandates, but not supported by interests will be suppressed. But, of greater interest is in understanding that once support shifts for an initiative all previous action is undone or at least mitigated to a point of inconsequence. Hence, limited bureaucratic autonomy is afforded either way. The multiple use requirements will not satisfy all parties, and does not allow the BLM to ignore other potential uses of the public lands.

This study focuses on explaining the intuition behind the empirical analyses in the paper. Investors could passively participate in the markets by just holding stocks without trading, or more aggressively participate in the market by directly trading stocks. Results show that the more aggressively they participate in the market, the more un-balanced they tend to supply liquidity in the stock market, which eventually drives up the stock price volatility.