Heyuan You

With the dynamic and complex changes in the farmers’ living environment and the vigorous development of entrepreneurial activities worldwide, farmer entrepreneurship is experiencing rapid growth. However, whether farmer entrepreneurship enhances the welfare of farmers’ families demands further scrutiny. Utilizing data from the Chinese Family Tracking Survey and drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, this article formulates a farmer family welfare evaluation index system to comprehensively assess the impact of farmer entrepreneurship on farmer families. The research findings reveal the following: (1) Entrepreneurship contributes to enhancing the welfare of farmer families, with entrepreneurial farmer families experiencing higher welfare levels than their non-entrepreneurial counterparts. (2) Farmer entrepreneurship falls short of delivering complete welfare improvements to farmers’ families. While various welfare conditions, such as family economics, social security, living conditions, and psychological conditions, have improved after starting a business, health welfare has seen a decline. (3) Farmland transfer significantly influences the process of farmer entrepreneurship, directly fostering the family welfare of entrepreneurial farmers. (4) Farmers’ entrepreneurial behavior yields greater welfare benefits for the new generation, farmers with higher education levels, and those situated in the central region. Building on these findings, this study proposes relevant improvement suggestions to offer robust support for policy considerations.

Cancer is a growing global health threat. Examining the determinants of cancer incidence can benefit for cancer treatment and prevention. Farmland transfer relates to the risk factors of esophageal cancer including environmental pollution, services access, and habits. This study characterizes the associations between farmland transfer and esophageal cancer incidence rate (ECI) that integrate mediated effect of pollution-related agricultural input intensity in Xiaoshan District, China. The state-space model is employed to quantify the relationships among farmland transfer, pollution-related agricultural input intensity, and ECI. The results showed that (1) Total effects of the proportion of transferred farmland (TFA) area cause a reduction in the ECI. Besides, the total positive effects of the proportion of transferred farmland cultivated non-grain crop (NGC) and proportion of farmland transferred to non-farmer users (NFU) show a downward trend. (2) The raise of TFA can result in the reduction of chemical fertilizer use intensity. Meanwhile, the raise of NGC and NFU can result in the growth of pollution-related agricultural input intensity. But these increasing effects generally show a downward trend. (3) Increasing chemical fertilizer use intensity and pesticide use intensity results in the rise of esophageal cancer incidence rate as a whole. (4) In general, farmland transfer has positive direct effects on esophageal cancer incidence rate. (5) The average proportions of mediated effects in all state-space models are larger than 10%. These findings can raise land reform policy designers’ awareness of the risk of public health since the land transfer markets are emerging rapidly in land reform in many developing countries to improve agricultural production.

Environmental noise has a major negative impact, causing interference for people to communicate, rest, sleep, and general annoyance. In order to control urban environmental noise, simulation-based optimisation for urban environmental noise is conducted. On the basis of the current acoustic environment of Zhaohui Campus of Zhejiang University of Technology, three optimisation plans that include noise barrier optimisation, greenbelt optimisation, and a combination optimisation of noise barrier and greenbelt are proposed. These scenarios are simulated using NoiseSystem software to obtain their ability to reduce noise and determine auditory perception by using different control measures. To determine the visual perception of the optimisation plan, 100 people of different age groups were randomly selected, and each person scored the noise barrier and the greenbelt in the simulated scenarios. Results of the comprehensive evaluation of auditory and visual perception show that noise barriers can provide better auditory feelings, but greenbelts can provide a better auditory and visual subjective experience. Therefore, in addition to the application of noise control measures, their visual design must be fully considered. Moreover, the visual perception of plants is stronger than that of others.