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Equity and growth are central concerns for development in Mexico. Specific inequalities in income, power, wealth, and status create and sustain economic institutions and policies that perpetuate these inequalities and promote poor economic performace. 'No Growth without Equity? Inequality, Interests, and Competition in Mexico' presents a novel analysis showing why more equality is necessary to increase economic growth. The authors analyze the causes of persistent inequality and weak growth in Mexico, despite major changes associated with NAFTA and democratization, and draw implications for policy design. The book involves an innovative synthesis of work on overall links between equity and growth, and carefully grounded analysis in specific areas. The issues are of intense interest to policy debate in Mexico and to the development community in Latin America and elsewhere.

Offering evidence from both detailed individual country studies and homogenized statistics across the Latin American and Caribbean region, this book examines the impact of the minimum wage on wages, employment, poverty, income distribution and government budgets in the context of a large informal sector and predominantly unskilled workforces.

After a long struggle against poverty, the problem of absolute poverty among Chinese rural residents has been solved, but the problem of relative poverty still exists. With digitalization, the ecological environment of rural inclusive finance has been optimized. This paper empirically tests the individual fixed-effect model and finds that digital inclusive finance has a positive income-increasing effect on rural residents. Wage income, operating income, and transfer income among the income types undergo a certain degree of promotion, while property income is affected to the contrary. In addition, digital inclusive finance has the same effect on farmers’ income increases in the east and central regions of China. However, it has a slightly smaller impact on farmers in the west. This paper uses a spatial econometric model and finds that promoting the development of local digital inclusive finance will enhance the income level of local farmers and increase the income of neighboring farmers. Therefore, this paper proposes to speed up the development of digital inclusive finance, optimize the rural financial ecological environment, strengthen government supervision and other recommendations, further enhance farmers’ income, and achieve common prosperity.

Promoting the development of eco-industries plays a significant role in achieving the harmonious symbiosis between economic growth and environmental protection as well as enhancing the comprehensive effectiveness of ecological and economic benefits. Due to their unique nature, cooperatives may play a crucial role in facilitating the integration between farmers and the development of eco-industries. To investigate whether cooperatives possess the capacity to enhance the income-generating effects for farmers involved in eco-industries, this study selected the Crested Ibis National Nature Reserve (CINNR), a representative area for eco-industry development, as the research site. Data were gathered through face-to-face interviews, and this research empirically analyzed the impact of cooperatives on the income-generating effect of farmers using endogenous switching regression (ESR). The findings are threefold. First, cooperatives indeed enhance the income-generating effects for farmers engaged in eco-industries. Second, variables such as the distribution of agroforestry materials, premium capacity, soil quality, and status of village cadres have a positive impact on farmers joining cooperatives, whereas punishment initiatives discourage their participation. Third, for farmers who have joined cooperatives, factors such as the distribution of agroforestry materials, premium capacity, low-cost conservation initiatives, land area, status of village cadres, the proportion of labor force, technical training, soil quality, and land area positively affect their income from eco-industries. Conversely, punishment initiatives, age, and land location negatively impact their income. The results of this study provide new ideas for farmers to participate in the development of eco-industries, new evidence showing co-operatives can improve farmers’ income, and new directions for coordinating conflicts between conservation and development in protected areas.

The conflict between biodiversity conservation and economic development is intense in developing countries. With the decline in biodiversity, the Chinese government imposed a 10-year fishing ban in the priority waters of the Yangtze River Basin, which resulted in many fishermen losing their livelihood. However, a compensation policy was subsequently introduced. To investigate the impact of the ban, we conducted a two-year study using balanced panel data and the PSM-DID model for 365 households in the Poyang Lake area and introduced fixed effects to discuss the impact of the Yangtze River fishing ban compensation policy on the income of returning fishermen and their choices for alternative income. We also explored the interactive effects of fishing ban compensation and other biodiversity conservation policies on their income. The results showed that the fishing ban negatively impacted the agricultural income of households but not the total household income, and the compensation somewhat subsidized the fishermen’s loss of income. Moreover, this was an opportunity for farmers to adjust their livelihood strategies. These findings improve our understanding of the impact of this fishing ban and compensation policy on the household incomes of returning fishermen and their adaptive strategies for alternative income.

In the face of increasing global unsustainable risks such as poverty, hunger, and pollution. Building sustainable agriculture (SA) in the digital age is a fundamental task for human survival. Based on the coupled coordination perspective, this paper constructs an SA system that takes into account more stakeholders by considering poverty alleviation and income increase (PI), food security (FS), and green agriculture (GA) as subsystems. The impact of digital technology on SA is systematically analyzed through data from 276 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2005 to 2020. The study shows that digital technology has a significant upgrading effect on SA and its subsystems. And digital technology is more likely to promote SA in the developed eastern region and peripheral cities. Moreover, agricultural productivity and labor productivity play a mediating mechanism in the process of digital technology for SA. Digital financial inclusion fuels the high input process of digital technology for incentivizing SA, PI, and GA, but it cannot affect the highly technical process of digital farming. Further research found that the incentives of digital technology for SA and GA are characterized by the nonlinear characteristic of increasing marginal effects. Due to the second digital divide, there is a U-shaped incentive process of digital technology for PI to fall and then rise. Finally, the spillover nature of digital technology leads to spatial spillovers in its contribution to SA development.

The growth of farmers’ income is one of the most critical issues in China’s “Three Rural Issues,” and optimizing fiscal policy support and improving credit supply are crucial to improving farmers’ income. Based on the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2020, this paper develops a PVAR model in order to explore the relationship between agricultural credit, fiscal support for agriculture, and farmers’ income from a dynamic perspective, considering regional heterogeneity. The empirical results show the following factors for farmers’ income growth: (1) From the GMM estimation, the positive correlation between fiscal support for agriculture is stronger than that of agricultural credit. (2) From the impulse-response function, in the eastern region, the positive shock of agricultural credit is positively correlated in the short run, but it will be negatively correlated as that of fiscal support for agriculture in the long run; in the central region, the positive shocks of agricultural credit and fiscal support for agriculture are persistently positively correlated; in the western region, the positive shocks of agricultural credit are persistently negatively correlated, while fiscal support for agriculture will be positively correlated in contrast. (3) From the variance decomposition, agricultural credit contributes more to famer’s income growth in the short run, while fiscal support for agriculture contributes more in the long run. The policy implications for promoting farmers’ income growth include implementing regionally differentiated agricultural credit development strategies, reasonably enhancing fiscal support for agriculture, and optimizing the structure of fiscal support for agriculture.

This paper innovatively proposes the concepts of length, width, and depth for modern agricultural industrial systems. The development level of the modern agricultural industrial system is systematically measured by the length of the agricultural industry chain, the width of agriculture in terms of its overlap with and integration of non-agriculture industries, and the depth of agricultural productive services. Using the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method, 88 main production areas of special and excellent agricultural products in Shanxi, China, are selected as sample objects. The configuration paths of the length, width, and depth of the modern agricultural industrial system impacting farmers’ wage income, operating income, property income, and transfer income are explored. The study found the following: (1) The income level of farmers is jointly influenced by the length, width, and depth of the modern agricultural industrial system, emphasizing that a single factor does not constitute a necessary condition for farmers’ income growth and prosperity. (2) There exist four types of paths through which the modern agricultural industrial system can promote increases in farmer incomes, namely “non-industry length * industry width”, “industry length * non-industry width * non-industry depth”, “non-industry length * industry depth” and “industry length * non-industry depth”, a various types of paths have a differential impact on the structure of farmers’ incomes. (3) The length, width, and depth of the modern agricultural industrial system individually have crowding-out effects on each of a farmer’s four types of income.

In certain low- and middle-income countries, information asymmetry, human capital damage and long-term economic decline are longstanding problems in health-related poverty alleviation. Notably, China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation program sheds new light on resolving these problems. Based on existing paradigms in the poverty research area, the purpose of this paper is to summarize and explore the roles of Chinese support policies in poor rural households coping with health shocks. Using a questionnaire survey of 4635 poor rural households in a municipality in Southwest China conducted from December 2018 to January 2019, this study examines the relationships between health shocks, human capital, support policies, and per capita household income. The results show that (1) apart from safety nets and cargo nets, monitoring nets are formed in China’s poverty alleviation practice, which could resolve the problem of information asymmetry. (2) Health shocks do not cause poor rural households to fall back into poverty. The reason for this is that safety net and cargo net policies are provided to relevant poor rural households by considering household human capital endowments and the information received from cargo nets. Through this method, patients can obtain effective support and caregivers can obtain off-farm employment opportunities. Thus, the ability of poor rural household human capital to resist health shocks is enhanced. (3) With the support of these policies, the negative effects of dependent family members and agricultural laborers on per capita household income are reversed. Thus, the long-term increase in poor rural household income is also ensured. These findings hold great value for other developing countries coping with health shocks and formulating anti-poverty policies.

The recovery of the global economy in the aftermath of COVID-19 faces enormous challenges. Ensuring stable income growth of the population has become an important means for developing countries to ensure sustained economic development. Raising the overall income of the population is a public initiative that benefits all citizens; therefore, governments of developing countries should promote the implementation of relevant public policies and the provision of public goods to ensure that existing economic instruments can benefit the entire population. In this regard, public space, as a typical form of public good, may play an important role in promoting the benefits of existing economic policies for all residents. This paper examines how residents’ use of public space contributes to their income growth through social capital. Hypotheses are tested based on an econometric analysis of 1565 questionnaires received from Chinese workers. The results show that residents’ use of public space can indeed be an important way to increase their income, which is realized through the enhancement of social capital. The research presented in this paper provides a new influence variable of public space to improve residents’ income. Further, it improves people’s understanding of the three classical concepts—public space, social capital, and income—by establishing the logical connection and theoretical explanation of physical space, emotional space, and value space in human society. The conclusions of this paper highlight the important role of public space in urban and rural development planning.