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In the developing countries, formal credit has dominant role for the development of agriculture sector. It increases the farmer's purchasing power for better farm inputs and agricultural technology for high crop productivity. The main purpose of this study is to examine the influence of socioeconomic characteristics of smallholder farmers for credit demand in Sindh, Pakistan.

A cross-sectional data set randomly collected from 90 smallholder farmers in Thatta district, Sindh, Pakistan, is examined. Descriptive statistics, correlation and the OLS regression method were used to demonstrate the important factors affecting the demand for formal credit.

The results revealed that formal education, experience of farming, landholding size, road access and extension contacts positively and significantly influenced the demand for formal credit.

This study is the first, to the best of authors' knowledge, to demonstrate the influence of various socioeconomic characteristics of smallholder farmers on demand for formal credit in Sindh, Pakistan. It also illustrates the imperative contribution to the literature regarding credit access and demand to improve the agricultural productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the key risk components (probability and consequence) and their respective thresholds affecting agri-food supply chain operations in Ghana. In addition, it seeks to understand the relationship between the major risk sources and to fathom the risk/disruption impact on agri-food supply chain performance in Ghana.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected using a structured questionnaire. The risks threshold associated with agri-food supply chain were categorized using the risk matrix scale and classification described in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (Project Management Institute, 2013). Next, the Pearson correlation was used to understand the relationship between the various risks and agri-food chain performance. Lastly, to investigate how firms’ supply chain operations have been affected by risks/disruptions, an ordinary least square regression model was employed to quantify the impact of some major risk sources on agri-food chain performance in Ghana.

The results in this paper show variations in risks’ probability, impact and threshold in agri-food supply chain. While risk sources such as periodic change in interest/exchange rate policies and volatility in customer demand are high-rated risks, uncertain land policies/tenure and poor quality control are low rated risks in the operations of the chain. The performance of the agri-food chain significantly but negatively correlates with all the major risks studied. Whereas demand, supply, weather, logistics/infrastructure and financial risk sources significantly undermined the chain’s performance, risks emerging from biological/environmental, management/operational, policy/regulations and political-related issues insignificantly affect the performance of agri-food supply chain in Ghana.

This research is an area biased. However, some insightful managerial implications can be drawn from this paper to manage agri-food chain operations in a similar unstable environment. The result implies that risks are inevitable in agri-food chain but they differ in terms of menace to the chain’s operation. Therefore, to manage agri-food supply chain risks effectively, managers should periodically identify, quantify and categorize risk sources before making risk response decisions. In addition, the results show that risks account for about half of the overall agri-food chain performance in Ghana. This infers that managers/practitioners could improve the performance of the agri-food chain if limited resources are allocated to plan and effectively respond to major risks sources (such as demand, supply, finance, weather and logistical/ infrastructural services-related risks) undermining the performance of the chain.

This research contributes to the agri-food chain risk literature and provides managers/practitioners with empirical evidence of risk thresholds and their corresponding major impact on agri-food chain’s performance. Since risks explained about half of agri-food chain performance in Ghana, this research would prompt decision makers to improve on their risk assessment and responds (e.g. by employing efficient demand, supply and weather forecasting systems, logistic/infrastructure services, hedge to finance, etc.) to improve the chain’s performance.

The climate change effects on agricultural output in different regions of the world and have been debated in the literature of emerging economies. Recently, the agriculture sector has influenced globally through climate change and also hurts all sectors of economies. This study aims to examine and explore the impact of global climate change on agricultural output in China over the period of 1982-2014.

Different unit root tests including augmented Dickey–Fuller, Phillips–Perron and Kwiatkowski, Phillips, Schmidt and Shin are used to check the order of integration among the study variables. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration and the Johansen cointegration test are applied to assess the association among the study variables with the evidence of long-run and short-run analysis.

Unit root test estimations confirm that all variables are stationary at the combination of I(0) and I(1). The results show that CO₂ emissions have a significant effect on agricultural output in both long-run and short-run analyses, while temperature and rainfall have a negative effect on agricultural output in the long-run. Among other determinants, the land area under cereal crops, fertilizer consumption, and energy consumption have a positive and significant association with agricultural output in both long-run and short-run analysis. The estimated coefficient of the error correction term is also highly significant.

China’s population is multiplying, and in the coming decades, the country will face food safety and security challenges. Possible initiatives are needed to configure the Chinese Government to cope with the adverse effects of climate change on agriculture and ensure adequate food for the growing population. In concise, the analysis specifies that legislators and policy experts should spot that the climate change would transmute the total output factors, accordingly a county or regional specific and crop-specific total factor of production pattern adaptation is indorsed.

The present empirical study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the impact of global climate change on agricultural output in China by using ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration and Johansen cointegration test.

Improvement and optimization design of a two-stage vibration isolation system proposed in this paper are conducted to ensure the device of electronic work effective.

The proposed two-stage vibration isolation system of airborne equipment is optimized and parameterized based on multi-objective genetic algorithm.

The results show that compared with initial two-stage vibration isolation system, the angular vibration of the two-stage vibration isolation system becomes 3.55 × 10^-4 rad, which decreases by 89%. The linear isolation effect is improved by at least 67.7%.

The optimized two-stage vibration isolation system effectively improves the vibration reduction effect, the resonance peak is obviously improved and the reliability of the mounting bracket and the shock absorber is highly improved, which provides an analysis method for two-stage airborne equipment isolation design under complex dynamic environment.

Instantaneous radial force induced from unsteady flow will intensify vibration noise of the centrifugal pump, especially under off-design working conditions, which will affect safety reliability of pump operation in severe cases. This paper aims to conduct unsteady numerical computation on one centrifugal pump; thus, unsteady fluid radial force upon the impeller and volute is obtained, so as to study the evolution law of instantaneous radial force, the internal relationship between radial force and pressure pulsation, the relationship among each composition of radial force that the impeller received and the influence of leakage rate of front and back chamber on radial force.

The unsteady numerical simulation with SST k-ω turbulence model was carried out for a low specific-speed centrifugal pump using computational fluid dynamics codes FLUENT. The performance tests and pressure tests were conducted by a closed loop system. The performance curves and the pressure distribution from numerical simulation agree with that of the experiment conducted. The unsteady pressure distributions and the instantaneous radial forces induced from unsteady flow were analyzed under different flow rates. Contribution degrees of three components of the radial force on the impeller and the relation between the radial force and leakage rate were analyzed.

Radial force on the volute and pressure pulsation on the volute wall have the same distribution tendency, but in contrast to the distribution trend of the radial force on the impeller. In the component of radial force that the impeller received, radial force on the blade accounts for the main position. With the decrease of flow rate, ratio of the radial force on front and back casings will be increased; under large flow rate, vortex and flow blockage at volute section will enhance the pressure and radial force fluctuation greatly, and the pulsation degree may be much more intense than that of a smaller flow rate.

This paper revealed the relation of the radial force and the pressure pulsation. Meanwhile, contribution degrees of three components of the radial force on the impeller under different working conditions as well as the relation between the radial force and leakage rate of front and rear chambers were analyzed.

This study aims to determine the nexus between agricultural production and agricultural loans for the period Q1 2003–Q4 2018 in Turkey.

The authors employ the time-series analyses within the scope of the study. Firstly, they run the Engle–Granger two-step cointegration test and the Toda–Yamamoto causality analysis. They also use the dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) model estimator and estimate the vector autoregression model for predicting the dynamic structure of time series.

The results of time series analyses reveal that the variables are cointegrated and there are causal relationships between agricultural loans and agricultural production. Also, the variance decomposition findings indicate that the effect of agricultural loans provided by development-investment banks and participation banks on agricultural production has increased over the years, and the deposit banks have a high impact on agricultural production. The results of the DOLS model indicate that agricultural loans have a positive effect on agricultural production.

This research is one of the few studies that comprehensively determines the direction of nexus between agricultural production and agricultural loans in Turkey economy. This is the first contribution of the study in the literature. Another contribution of this study is to investigate the nexus between agricultural production and agricultural loans for banking sector groups. Unlike other studies in the literature, this study calculates the variance decomposition by going beyond unit root and cointegration tests. Thus, this study has deep findings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of informal credit access on agricultural productivity in rural Ghana.

Data sets from the Ghana Feed the Future baseline survey involving a total sample of 2,437 rural farm households were used. In order to address the problem of endogeneity and sample selectivity bias, the endogenous switching regression (ESR) model was employed to examine whether rural farm households’ with access to informal credit and those without access differ in terms of their productivity levels and whether access to informal credit affects agricultural productivity.

Estimates from the ESR show that access to informal credit significantly promotes agricultural productivity. Specifically, farmers with access to informal credit were able to achieve a yield of 48.42 kg/ha more than their counterparts without informal credit access. In terms of the counterfactual, farmers without informal credit access would have increased their yield by 57.61 kg/ha if they were to have access to informal credit.

The study was restricted to the savannah ecological zone of Ghana. This limits the extent of generalisation of results.

This study provides a rigorous econometric analysis of the impacts of access to informal credit on agricultural productivity in rural Ghana. The study contributes to the current debate on the link between access to informal credit and agricultural productivity and provides valuable input for policymakers.