In this article, we develop a dynamic model to show how membership in agricultural cooperatives influences smallholder farmers' decisions to invest in organic soil amendments and chemical fertilizer. The model considers management decisions of heterogonous producers within an intertemporal framework, with the decision to join the cooperative assumed to be endogenous. Farm‐level data of apple farmers from three provinces in China are used to estimate the impact of cooperative membership on investment in organic soil amendments and chemical fertilizer. A recursive bivariate probit model that accounts for potential endogeneity of cooperative membership and selection bias is employed in the empirical analysis. The empirical results show that cooperative membership exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on the likelihood of investing in organic soil amendments. The findings also reveal that tenure security, human capital, farm size, and access to credit positively and significantly influence the probability of a farmer joining a cooperative and the likelihood of investing in soil quality measures.
The expansion of the Internet in developing countries has important implications for the economic development of rural areas. Although many studies have investigated various benefits of Internet use, little attention has been paid to find the relationship between Internet use and the economic well-being of rural households. This paper, therefore, investigates the effects of Internet use on household income and expenditure, using a sample of rural households from China. Both endogenous treatment regression (ETR) and unconditional quantile regression (UQR) techniques are used to identify the homogenous and heterogeneous effects of Internet use, respectively. The ETR results show that Internet use increases household income and expenditure significantly. However, the UQR results reveal that Internet use has a larger impact at the upper distributions of household income and expenditure.
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