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The purpose of this paper is to focus on labor movement in the agricultural sector of Taiwan to clarify the relationship between agricultural policy and the agricultural adjustment problem by estimating the labor movement function.

The relationship between agricultural policy and the adjustment process of agricultural labor in Taiwan was analyzed by modeling labor movement between the agricultural sector and other sectors. Through empirical analysis of labor migration function, it is clear that the following policy factors, affect the incentive for labor migration, and obstruct off‐farm labor migration: the price support policy; the incomplete farmland conversion regulations, which increase farmers' farmland possession motive; and government agricultural expenditure, which includes direct transfers to the agricultural sector.

The study confirms that after the late 1980s the factors that obstruct agricultural adjustment much more than the price support policy are the incomplete farmland conversion regulations and increasing government agricultural payments, from the result of the simulation with the influence of the policy eliminated.

The implication of this paper is that even though Taiwan has been participating in World Trade Organization from 2002 and consented to cut the tariff on agricultural products and reduce agriculture support policies not linked to production, a delay in labor adjustment between the agricultural sector and other sectors may not necessarily be eliminated if there are other policy factors that affect the incentive for off‐farm migration by farmers.

Many studies use the labor migration function for empirical analysis, but most of them estimated the function by a simple single regression which shows that the labor movement from the agricultural sector to the other sectors increases as a result of an expanding wage gap. However, off‐farm labor movement reduces the wage gap between sectors adversely. Therefore, a reverse causal relation exists between labor movement and the wage gap between sectors. The endogeneity problem was considered as analyzing the measurement of the labor migration function.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if credit rationing persists even in the era of financial liberalization, the extent to which individual, firm and loan characteristics influence the rationing behavior of commercial banks and whether the agricultural sector is discriminated against in the commercial bank credit market.

The study employed a probit model with marginal effects and a generalized Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition estimation on a randomly selected data of 1,239 entrepreneurs from eight commercial banks’ credit records about their individual, firm and loan characteristics.

The study revealed that credit rationing persists and that applying for a relatively longer payment period, providing collateral and guarantor, being illiterate, being relatively older and being in the agricultural sector increases the likelihood of being credit rationed, while having some relationship with the bank, having non-mandatory savings and applying from a bank with relatively high interest rates reduce the likelihood of being credit rationed. The study also revealed a credit gap of 17.77 percent and a positive discrimination against borrowers in the agricultural sector as the gap was largely being influenced by unexplained factors.

The research was intended to cover a large number of commercial banks in Ghana. However, most of the banks were unwilling to provide such information about their borrowers; hence, the research was limited to only eight commercial banks who provided the author with the information needed for the study.

The study concludes that policies that enhance human capital, women, and older access to credit and agricultural-oriented financial services and others, will go a long way to reduce rationing and increase access to credit, especially to the agricultural sector.

The research proposes the use of group lending as a form of collateral and monitoring to ease risks and default, and hence supports sustainable funding to increase access and outreach.

The paper looks at the comprehensive way about the various factors determining credit rationing in that it considers not only the individual, economic/firm and loan characteristics but also the extent to which discrimination toward the agricultural sector exists in the commercial banks credit market.

This paper investigates the impact of bank credit on agricultural productivity in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) from 1990 to 2019. Studies’ results on the impact of bank credit on agricultural productivity are not conclusive. The studies demonstrate diverse outcomes which are debatable. The results are conflicting.

Agricultural value added (AGRVA) to the gross domestic product (GDP) proxies agricultural productivity while domestic credit to the private sector by banks (DCPSB), broad money supply, land, inflation (INF), physical capital (PHKAP) and labour supply are explanatory variables. The autoregressive distributed lag technique is utilized.

The co-integration test results show a long-run co-integration among the variables. The findings disclose that DCPSB, land and PHKAP impact positively on the AGRVA. Broad money supply, INF and labour impact negatively on the AGRVA to the GDP.

The results suggest that the CEMAC governments should encourage effective ways to increase bank credit flow to private enterprises in the agricultural sector through efficient bank's intermediation.

The governments should create more agricultural banks and improve the operation of existing ones to ensure direct credit to agricultural activities. The Bank of Central African Economic and Monetary Community should apply aggressive policy which eliminates all the bottlenecks undermining credit flow to the private sector in mutualism with agricultural productivity.

The commercial banks should give more credit to private sector to mutually benefit the agricultural sector and the banking sector. The governments of the CEMAC economies should expand funding into the capital market which considerably boosts agricultural productivity.

Studies’ results on the impact of bank credit on agricultural productivity are not conclusive. The studies demonstrate diverse outcomes which are debatable. The results are conflicting; some reveal positive impacts, some show negative impacts and others indicate U-shape behaviour. Hence, research is required to fill the lacuna.

The study aims to identify the dynamic complexities and development points of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) in the agricultural sector of Iran to improve production factors' productivity, including arable land, water resources and human capital.

First, the EE of the agricultural sector in Iran was designed following Isenberg's framework. Then, the main variables and interrelationships of the variables in each context of the ecosystem, called subsystems, were formulated using the system dynamics (SD) approach. Next, the model was simulated and validated. Afterward, different policy options were identified, embedded into the model structure and simulated. Finally, the best policy group was selected.

According to Isenberg's EE model, three groups of policies were identified and evaluated, including “entrepreneurship development financing and investment policy,” “agricultural ecosystem's supportive services development policy” and “production factors productivity development policy.” According to the simulation results, the best combination of the solution strategies was recognized. The presented SD-EE model has a generic nature in the agricultural sector and could be modified to be applied in different regions for policy-making purposes.

The main contribution of the study is twofold. First, Isenberg's EE framework is applied to structure the main subsystems and interrelationships of the subsystems in the agricultural sector that has previously received limited attention. Second, the research is the first to operationalize the basic theory of Isenberg's EE in practice applying a robust systemic modeling methodology like SD.

This study aims to analyze the productivity improvement strategies of the agricultural sector based on the problems faced by the agricultural sector in Central Java, Indonesia.

The analysis is done through interviews, literature studies and analytical hierarchy process data processing aids.

The results show that the strategy for developing the agricultural sector in Central Java needs to be focused on institutional factors to organize the field agricultural sector institutions. The ideal institution for the development of the agricultural sector in Central Java is cooperatives that can be accompanied by the Islamic Microfinance Institutions (LKMS).

This paper will contribute new knowledge specifically about the productivity improvement strategy through the cooperative institution.

The centrality of agricultural sector to the economy, particularly in developing countries, has drawn the attention of researchers to critically examine different factors determining the performance of the sector. Given that massive investment is required to ensure maximum productivity in the sector, one of the factors identified is the issue of financing. However, financing agricultural sector in a poor institutional environment can be depressing. In the light of this, the purpose of this paper is to examine the nexus between financial development and agricultural performance in Nigeria with a view to investigating the role of institutions.

The study employed annual data spanning the period from 1981 to 2016. Three indicators of financial development and five institutional variables were used. Besides, for robust analysis, the study also computed an aggregate measure of financial development and institutions using principal component method. Autoregressive distributed lag method of estimation was used to examine the short-run and long-run effects of financial development on agricultural performance in Nigeria.

The findings showed that financial development has a positive impact on agricultural performance in Nigeria. However, this positive impact is being undermined by institutional variables.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the only study that examines the mediating role of institutional factors such as the rule of law, control of corruption, etc., in the financial development–agricultural performance nexus in Nigeria.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of agriculture in economic growth and its interactions with other sectors of the Tunisian economy.

Johansen's multivariate approach is used to study the cointegration of the different sectors of the Tunisian economy and overcome the problem of spurious regression. Special attention is paid to investigate non‐causality between agriculture and other economic sectors.

Empirical results suggest that all Tunisian economic sectors cointegrate and tend to move together. In addition, weak exogeneity for the agricultural sector is rejected and this underlines the fact that the agricultural sector should be considered by policymakers in the analysis of intersector growth. However, in the short run, agriculture in Tunisia seems to have a partial role as a driving force in the growth of other non‐agricultural sectors and agricultural growth may be conducive only to the agro‐food industry sub‐sector. In addition, while Tunisia started improving quality of services and restructuring the banking sector to make it “internationally” viable, this paper's statistical results indicate that the agricultural sector does not fully benefit from the development of the commerce and services sector and the presence of credit market constraints continue to hamper growth of agricultural output in Tunisia.

Although high importance is placed on the agricultural sector, in the context of the Tunisian economy, the issue of agricultural contribution to the economic growth has often been raised by policymakers but rarely examined empirically.

This paper systematically reviewed the contributions of the recent Nigerian government agricultural policies and the impacts on the agricultural value chain system in line with the structural transformation of the sector and the Nigeria's vision 20:2020. The study also suggest strategies to upgrading various segments of the agricultural value chain and argue that Nigeria's agricultural sector requires huge investments and innovative ideas to increase production and create value addition across the most profitable areas of the value chain.

The authors systematically present evidences and data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (the apex monetary authority of Nigeria) and Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (oversees and publishes statistics for Nigeria) to estimate the impact of Government agricultural policies on the value chains system.

The study discovers that the various recent government policy interventions to tackle the austere challenges in the agricultural sector are yet to yield much significant solution. Given to the dwindling performance of the sector, the Nigerian agricultural value chain is somewhat affected with systemic and services gaps which underpin the market failures (missing markets and weak markets), although the agricultural value chain has the potential of triggering economic growth in a higher scale with a trickle-down effect to other sectors of the Nigerian economy.

Overall, the findings indicate strategies to upgrading the production and processing segments of the agricultural value chain and argues that Nigeria's agricultural sector requires huge investments and innovative ideas to increase production and create value addition across the most profitable areas of the value chain.

The study proves that enhancing value addition in the agricultural sector is imperative to achieving triple-benefits of increasing productivity by building resilient systems that leverage on finance opportunities, deepening economic inclusive growth and achieving great milestones.

This study is the first attempt to focus on agricultural value chain system in line with the structural transformation and the Nigeria's vision 20:2020.

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is an important means of boosting the agricultural sectors of developing economies. The first necessary step to formulate effective public policies to encourage agricultural FDI inflow to a host country is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the main determinants of FDI inflow to the agricultural sector, which is the main objective of the present study.

In view of this, we take a comprehensive approach to exploring the macroeconomic and institutional determinants of FDI inflow to the agricultural sector by examining a large panel data set on agricultural FDI inflows of 37 countries, investigating both groups of developed and developing countries, incorporating a large list of potentially relevant macroeconomic and institutional variables, and applying panel-data econometric models and estimation structures, including pooled, fixed-effects and random-effects regression models.

The general pattern of our findings implies that the degree of openness of an economy has a negative effect on FDI inflows to agricultural sectors, suggesting that the higher the degree of openness in an economy, the lower the level of agricultural protection against foreign trade and imports, and thus the less incentive for FDI to inflow to the agricultural sector of the economy. Additionally, our results show that economic growth (as an indicator of the rate of market-size growth in the host economy) and per-capita real GDP (as an indicator of the standard of living in the host country) are both positively related to FDI inflows to agricultural sectors. Our other results suggest that agricultural FDI tends to flow more to developing countries in general and more to those with higher standards of living and income levels in particular.

FDI inflow has not received much attention with respect to the identification of its main determinants in the context of agricultural sectors. Additionally, there are very few panel-data studies on the determinants of FDI, and even more surprisingly, there are no such studies on the main determinants of FDI inflow to the agricultural sector. We have taken a comprehensive approach by studying FDI inflow variations across countries as well as over time.

The global energy market has been facing lower prices of crude oil in recent years. Lower fuel price leads to lower transport cost and cheaper agricultural inputs (such as pesticides and chemical fertilizer), resulting in lower prices of agricultural commodities in the international markets. On the other hand, lower global oil price reduces the oil revenues of oil exporting countries, resulting in a decrease in government expenditures. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of lower global oil and agricultural commodity prices and government expenditure on the entire economy and poverty level of Malaysia.

This study used a computable general equilibrium model (CGE) to investigate four simulation scenarios based on the latest Malaysia’s input-output table belonging to 2010. The first scenario is a 30 per cent fall in the export and import prices of agricultural commodity prices, while the second is a 50 per cent decline in the export and import prices of crude oil, and the third combines them. In the fourth scenario, government operating expenditure declines by 4 per cent because of the fall in government’s oil revenues as a result of the decline in global oil prices.

The simulation results suggest that lower international oil price decreases real gross domestic product (GDP) and investment in Malaysia and influences positively the output and employment of some agriculture sectors. However, lower agricultural commodity price increases real GDP and investment in the country and negatively influences the output, employment and exports of all agriculture sectors. The decline in government expenditures also increases the output and the employment in the economy, whereas it decreases household consumption. In conclusion, results show that the agriculture sector losses from the current decline in international agricultural commodity prices, while it benefits from lower oil and government expenditure.

The main contribution of this study is comparing the impacts of recent falls in global oil and agricultural prices on the entire economy and agriculture sector of Malaysia. Investigating the impacts of these issues on the poverty level of Malaysian households is another contribution to the study. Another contribution is analyzing the impact of a reduction in government expenditures because of the decline in global oil price on the economy and welfare of Malaysia. Therefore, this study makes a useful contribution to the small literature of the topic.