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The Sierra Leonean government has implemented the improved rice varieties directed at enhancing more rice production to reduce food insecurity. This paper evaluates the food security effect of improved rice variety adoption using cross-sectional data collected in 2017 from a randomly selected sample of 624 rice farmers in Sierra Leone. The analysis uses the endogenous switching regression and propensity score matching (PSM) approach. The results revealed that the adoption of improved rice varieties has a significant positive effect on food security. That confirms the crucial role of improved rice variety adoption in increasing food production and food security. Therefore, the study recommended the intensification of policies that promote improved rice variety adoption, if more food production and food security are to be realized. Further, the government should continue the lead in rice variety promotion and dissemination and in enhancing an enabling environment for the effective adoption of farmers. Given the preponderant evidence of the different factors of food security, appropriate policies that seek to promote formal education, more income generation for farmers, and easy and credible access to farmland for landless farmers would enhance food security.

We examine the short‐term impact of the Positive List System (PLS), a strict food safety standard implemented by Japan in 2006, on vegetable exports from China to Japan. By applying a difference‐in‐difference model to unique monthly export data at the firm‐product level, we found that the PLS decreased the probability of Chinese vegetable firms exporting to Japan by 3.4%, and decreased their export quantity and value by 9.7% and 8.6%, respectively. Most of the policy impact is through a decrease in the intensive trade margin (i.e., how much to trade), rather than the extensive trade margin (i.e., whether to trade). We also found that foreign‐invested enterprises and smaller enterprises are less affected than non‐foreign‐invested enterprises and larger enterprises. Our results alleviate the concern that stricter food safety standards may exclude many firms, especially small ones, from the export market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obesity and overweight have become increasingly prevalent in developing countries like China. This paper explores the evolvement of body mass index (BMI) of the Chinese population using a nationally representative sample. Focusing on familial transmission of BMI, we model married couple's BMI jointly and explore how parents' BMI affect children's BMI. In particular, we use spousal and parental characteristics as proxy variables to account for potential omitted variables bias and explicitly model common couple effect with the correlated random-effects model for couple' BMI. Our analysis suggests strong and positive spousal dependence and intergenerational transmissions of BMI in Chinese families. The influences of spousal BMI, parental BMI and a variety of social economic characteristics are found to depend on gender, region of residence (urban versus rural) and evolve over time. We find positive effects of spousal BMI that are significant, asymmetric (greater for wife than for husband), and generally vary across regions. For grown children, we find parental BMI to be the most important predictors for children's BMI. Since families can play an essential role in preventing obesity, our results can be useful for developing health intervention programs and promoting healthy lifestyle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an emerging economy like China where the domestic income inequality has dramatically increased between middle‐class urban consumers and poor rural farmers, food grown by poor farmers with poverty alleviation labels may receive price premiums from consumers with multiple incentives. To reveal consumers' willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for anti‐poverty labelled food, we implement a non‐hypothetical Becker–DeGroot–Marschak auction online experiment for apples with real shoppers. Results show that consumers are willing to pay 3.66 RMB extra for each kilogram of apples with anti‐poverty labels, indicating the opportunities for using voluntary public food consumption to supplement the government's anti‐poverty responsibilities. Consumers who are more empathic, who believe that anti‐poverty products have higher quality, who have donated money within the past year, and who are not involve with anti‐poverty related production or selling processes are willing to pay more. Additionally, three different information treatments (a beneficiary description, an appreciation certificate and a government promotion document) were found to increase consumers' WTP for anti‐poverty products. Treatment effects are different among consumers with different demographic characters and perspectives about the anti‐poverty label. Lastly, anti‐poverty labels can attract consumers for trial purchase but are not sufficient to lead consumers to make repeat purchases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]