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The purpose of this paper is to estimate shadow prices of agricultural carbon emissions produced by agricultural inputs, rice paddy and burning crop residue, and to explore the impact of cropping pattern on marginal abatement cost (MAC).

The shadow price of agricultural carbon emissions is estimated by applying directional distance function and non-parametric methods.

The estimated shadow price of agricultural carbon emissions ranges from 6.78 to 557.83 yuan/ton, and the average value is 62.50 yuan/ton (or $10.18/ton). The MAC value varies in different provinces and years. The regional difference of MAC shows a decreasing trend during the investigation period. Cropping pattern shows a significant negative impact on agricultural MAC. A 1 percent decrease of rice proportion leads to a 0.31 percent increase in MAC value. This implies that the higher the proportion of rice is, the lower the economic cost to reduce agricultural carbon emissions would be.

It is feasible to draw up appropriate mechanisms for the allocation of emission reduction responsibilities according to conditions in various regions, with emphasis on the local cropping patterns. There is a trade-off between reducing carbon emission and increasing crop yields.

This study calculates agricultural MAC by using the shadow price approach, taking agricultural carbon emissions as undesired environmental output. The study also provides a reference emission right price and provides guidance to make use of cropping structure adjustment and optimization for exploring the emission reduction strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation, and discuss how it is affected by climate change and tubewell density in rural China.

This study is based on a nine-province village survey and secondary climate data. A Tobit model (or censored regression model) was used to estimate the determinants of supply reliability of groundwater irrigation.

Results show that the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation was 89 percent on average in the past three years. The non-linear relationship in the econometric results revealed that the 30-year annual temperature significantly influenced the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation. When the temperature rises above the turning point (6.30°C), it shifts from a positive to a negative relationship with the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation. The 30-year annual temperature in eight of the nine provinces (i.e. except for Jilin Province) was higher than the turning point. If the temperature increases by 20°C in the future, other factors being constant, the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation will decline by 20 percent. However, if precipitation increases by 10 percent, the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation could improve by 3 percent, while reducing precipitation by 10 percent will lower the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation by 3 percent. Increasing the density of tubewells considerably improves the supply reliability of groundwater irrigation. However, although increasing the density of tubewells may yield enough groundwater for irrigation, this one-sided approach raises sustainability concerns.

Although increasing the density of tubewells may ensure that enough groundwater is available for irrigation, such a conclusion is one sided, and sustainability concerns should be raised in assessing this method of creating supply reliability.

This paper improves the understanding of the impact of climate variables on agriculture irrigation and water supply reliability in the micro scale, and provides a scientific basis for relevant policy making.

Smart farming technologies (SFTs) can increase yields and reduce the environmental impacts of farming by improving the efficient use of inputs. This paper is to estimate farmers' preference and willingness to pay (WTP) for a well-defined SFT, smart drip irrigation (SDI) technology.

This study conducted a discrete choice experiment (DCE) among 1,300 maize farmers in North China to understand their WTP for various functions of SDI using mixed logit (MIXL) models.

The results show that farmers have a strong preference for SDI in general and its specific functions of smart sensing and smart control. However, farmers do not have a preference for the function of region-level agronomic planning. Farmers' preferences for different functions of SDI are heterogeneous. Their preference was significantly associated with their education, experience of being village cadres and using computers, household income and holding of land and machines. Further analysis show that farmers' WTP for functions facilitated by hardware is close to the estimated prices, whereas their WTP for functions wholly or partially facilitated by software is substantially lower than the estimated prices.

Findings from the empirical study lead to policy implications for enhancing the design of SFTs by integrating software and hardware and optimizing agricultural extension strategies for SFTs with digital techniques such as videos.

This study provides initial insights into understanding farmers' preferences and WTP for specific functions of SFTs with a DCE.

Drought-related climate risk and access to credit are among the major risks to agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers in Kenya. Farmers are usually credit-constrained due to either involuntary quantity rationing or voluntary risk rationing. By exploiting randomized distribution of weather risk-contingent credit (RCC) and traditional credit, the authors estimate the causal effect of bundling weather index insurance to credit on uptake of agricultural credits among rural smallholders in Eastern Kenya. Further, the authors assess farmers' credit rationing, its determinants and effects on credit uptake.

The study design was a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Machakos County, Kenya. 1,170 sample households were randomly assigned to one of three research groups, namely control, RCC and traditional credit. This paper is based on baseline household survey data and the first phase of loan implementation data.

The authors find that 48% of the households were price-rationed, 41% were risk-rationed and 11% were quantity-rationed. The average credit uptake rate was 33% with the uptake of bundled credit being significantly higher than that of traditional credit. Risk rationing seems to influence the credit uptake negatively, whereas premium subsidies do not have any significant association with credit uptake. Among the socio-economic variables, training attendance, crop production being the main household head occupation, expenditure on food, maize labour requirement, hired labour, livestock revenue and access to credit are found to influence the credit uptake positively, whereas the expenditure on non-food items is negatively related with credit uptake.

The study findings provide important insights on the factors of credit demand. Empirical results suggest that risk rationing is pervasive and discourages farmers to take up credit. The study results also imply that credit demand is inelastic although relatively small sample size for RCC premium subsidy groups may be a limiting factor to the authors’ estimation.

By implementing a multi-arm RCT, the authors estimate the factors affecting the uptake of insurance bundled agricultural credits along with eliciting credit rationing among rural smallholders in Eastern Kenya. This paper provides key empirical findings on the uptake of RCC and the effect of credit rationing on uptake of agricultural credits, a field which has been majorly theoretical.

Whether there exists an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and its efficiency remains a hotly debated question among agricultural economists. In most studies to date, farm efficiency is measured by land productivity. Thus, the IR actually measures the relationship between farm size and land productivity. The purpose of this paper is to examine and understand the IR from a novel angle by using multiple definitions of farm efficiency indicators like labor productivity, profit ratio, total factor productivity (TFP) and technical efficiency (TE).

By using the farm-level panel data from Hubei province in China from 1999 to 2003, this paper employs the two-way fixed effect model of panel data and the stochastic frontier analysis of Battese and Coelli model to investigate the relationship between farm size and its production efficiency derived from the multiple definitions of production efficiency indicators including land productivity, labor productivity, profit ratio, TFP and TE.

The study confirmed the IR between land productivity and farm size, as in many formal studies. However, the relationship between farm size and other agricultural efficiency indicators may be positive, negative or uncorrelated at, depending on how the farm efficiency is defined. Therefore, the paper concluded that the relationship between farm size and its production efficiency is mixed. This paper provides economic explanations for the IR through the comprehensive study using the expansion of agricultural efficiency indicators.

Because different agricultural efficiency indicators have different policy implications for China's future agricultural and land policy, the findings have tremendous policy implications, particularly in terms of the current debate on large or small farm development strategy, the also so-called “go big or small” agricultural strategy. In this sense, the Chinese household responsibility system has played a critical role in its agriculture and will continue to play a critical role in terms of social security and social equality. Any reform to this system should proceed with caution.

While most existing studies only try to explain the IR from the perspective of land productivity, this paper attempts to propose a novel angle to examine the IR by using multiple definitions of agricultural efficiency and hopes to find some new conclusions.

This paper examines the general value to users of a range of electronic journal functions and their usefulness in the specific context of the SuperJournal Project. For the evaluation of each of the functions three types of data were analysed in relation to each other and in light of other contextual data: logged data of usage, survey data on user satisfaction, and survey data on the perceived importance of the function. The analysis shows that basic browsing, printing and search make up the core functions of electronic journals; other functions, such as saving of bibliographic data, alerting, customising, links with external resources and communication, serve as peripheral functions. The usefulness of both the core functions and the peripheral functions in a specific service is influenced by various implementation factors. However, it is the realised usefulness of the core functions which determines the use of a service.

This study aims to investigate how understanding of objective knowledge (as defined by Karl Popper) is experienced by the knowledge recipient and the role that information plays in such understanding.

Husserl's phenomenological approach is applied to a sample of undergraduate students' lived experiences of understanding, collected through diaries and interviews.

This study finds that understanding of certain objective knowledge develops as the knowledge appears and eventually gives itself to consciousness through the information conveying it; different degrees of givenness of the knowledge in consciousness is experienced by the mind as different levels of understanding; a relatively solid understanding is achieved when the knowledge emerges as an erected knowledge-object in consciousness. Understanding of complex objective knowledge requires not only adequate amount (dose) of information but also corroboration of manifold information sources and formats.

The findings of this study apply to the understanding of objective knowledge as defined by Popper. Further research is needed to examine other types of understanding.

This study informs educators and LIS professionals the typical phases in the lived experience of understanding objective knowledge, and the role of information in facilitating the understanding; it urges the two professions to take such experience into consideration when designing courses and information products/services, respectively.

Drawing on Husserl's phenomenological approach, this study provides an intuitive account of understanding of objective knowledge, and clarifies a number of conceptual confusions within LIS concerning understanding. It may also have some cross-disciplinary relevance for reflecting education objectives and explaining the Aha! experience in psychology.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the multifaceted information disadvantages facing the so‐called information poor in today's society. It has two specific objectives: to identify, from the empirical evidence of individuals' daily and regular information practices, meaningful constructs for defining information inequality; and to investigate how the “information poor” characterise on these constructs in comparison with others.

The study developed its findings in relation to the above objectives inductively from the interview transcripts of 73 people of different social statuses and occupations regarding their daily and regular information practices.

Three concepts emerged as meaningful constructs to define information inequality, hence to describe the information poor: individuals' information resource bases, information practices, and information assets. The information poor are found to be disadvantaged in all these aspects. They are first disadvantaged by limited freedom and/or opportunities in claiming society's vast and rapidly increasing information resources into their own information resource bases; then by the constraint of their information practices in developing their information resource bases and obtaining information utilities from these resources; and further more by impoverished information assets to empower themselves in normal and problematic situations.

Understanding of the information poor as sketched above will likely demand further research into a number of issues/areas hitherto ignored by information inequality studies.

This paper is one of the first to address empirically one of the most fundamental questions in information inequality studies; it extends library and information science understanding of the information poor hitherto dominated by the information deficiency thesis.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the epistemological underpinning of SERVQUAL and its limitations; and second, to propose ways to enhance the utility of SERVQUAL as a library assessment tool.

The study first conceptualises quality judgment as a knowing process and locates the epistemological stance of SERVQUAL within the general framework of epistemology demarcation; it then examines related SERVQUAL assumptions and their implications for library assessment in general and for service quality assessment in particular based on two empirical investigations: a questionnaire survey and an interview survey. The questionnaire survey applies the SERVQUAL instrument to three Chinese university libraries, with a view to examining the SERVQUAL score in light of epistemological considerations; the interview survey interviews 50 faculty users in one of the three universities with a view to illuminating the naturalistic process through which users develop their judgement of the library's service quality and through which the SERVQUAL score is formed.

The study shows that the actual SERVQUAL score is distributed in a very scattered manner in all three libraries, and that it is formed through a very complex process rooted primarily in the user's personal experiences with the library, which are in turn shaped by factors from both the library world and the user's life‐world. Based on these findings, this research questions a number of SERVQUAL assumptions and proposes three concepts which may help to contextualise the SERVQUAL score and enhance its utility in actual library assessment: library planning based variance of user perception, perception‐dependent user expectation and library‐sophistication based user differentiation.

The research presented in the paper questions a number of SERVQUAL assumptions and proposes three concepts that may help to contextualise the SERVQUAL score and enhance its utility in actual library assessment.

This paper aims to propose a new view planning method which can be used to calculate the next-best-view (NBV) for multiple manipulators simultaneously and build an automated three-dimensional (3D) object reconstruction system, which is based on the proposed method and can adapt to various industrial applications.

The entire 3D space is encoded with octree, which marks the voxels with different tags. A set of candidate viewpoints is generated, filtered and evaluated. The viewpoint with the highest score is selected as the NBV.

The proposed method is able to make the multiple manipulators, equipped with “eye-in-hand” RGB-D sensors, work together to accelerate the object reconstruction process.

Compared to the existed approaches, the proposed method in this paper is fast, computationally efficient, has low memory cost and can be used in actual industrial productions where the multiple different manipulators exist. And, more notably, a new algorithm is designed to speed up the generation and filtration of the candidate viewpoints, which can guarantee both speed and quality.