PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the main ways in which large amounts of information have been integrated to provide new measures of food consumption and agricultural production, and new methods for gathering and analyzing internet-based data.Design/methodology/approachThis study reviews some of the recent developments and applications of big data, which is becoming increasingly popular in agricultural economics research. In particular, this study focuses on applications of new types of data such as text and graphics in consumers' online reviews emerging from e-commerce transactions and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data as well as other producer data that are gaining popularity in precision agriculture. This study then reviews data gathering techniques such as web scraping and data analytics tools such as textual analysis and machine learning.FindingsThis study provides a comprehensive review of applications of big data in agricultural economics and discusses some potential future uses of big data.Originality/valueThis study documents some new types of data that are being utilized in agricultural economics, sources and methods to gather and store such data, existing applications of these new types of data and techniques to analyze these new data.
After decades of exploration and development, the credit system has become the main trend of reform in Chinese colleges. The credit system has brought some progress but also leads to some problems. The study takes Shantou University as an example, and the students in Shantou University as the objects to investigate the relationship between students and the relationship between teachers and students by using the business anthropology approach.
Despite being a country of various blue stockings, Indian daughters particularly from the countryside and lower socioeconomic hierarchy have remained the victims of unfairness in learning opportunities from ancient to modern time. The present research work tries to examine the regional progress and inequality in education and determinants of lower educational prospects of girls in India on the basis of secondary data. Here, the disparity index and correlation coefficient are applied to analyze the gender discrepancy of education and the relationship between literacy and its major determinants respectively. It has been examined that despite the celebration of longtime independence, it is very distrustful to accept that one fourth proportion of the population of the country is not capable to read and write to an easy cohesion of words with understanding in any of language. Though various plans have been launched with prime target of enhancing the female literacy, yet in all over the nation, the disparity in literacy still exists which demands some impressive efforts for bringing the equity.
Although the benefits of genetically modified (GM) crops have been well documented, how do farmers manage the risk of new technology in the early stages of technology adoption has received less attention. We compare the total factor productivity (TFP) of cotton to other major crops (wheat, rice, and corn) in China between 1990 and 2015, showing that the TFP growth of cotton production is significantly different from all other crops. In particular, the TFP of cotton production increased rapidly in the early 1990s then declined slightly around 2000 and rose again. This pattern coincides with the adoption of Bt cotton process in China. To further investigate the decline of TFP in the early stages of Bt cotton adoption, using aggregate provincial-level data, we implement a TFP decomposition and show that the productivity of GM technology is higher, whereas the technical efficiency of GM technology is lower than that of traditional technologies. Especially, Bt cotton exhibited lower technical efficiency because farmers did not reduce the use of pesticide when they first started to adopt Bt cotton. In addition, we illustrate the occurrence of a learning process as GM technology diffuses throughout China: after farmers gain knowledge of Bt cotton, pesticide use declines and technical efficiency improves.
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