This study examines the economic feasibility of the environment-friendly farmland use policy to improve water quality. Conventional highland farming, polluting the Han River basin in South Korea, can be converted into environment-friendly farming through land acquisition or application of pesticide-free or organic farming practices. We estimate the welfare measures of improvement in water quality and the costs of policy implementation for economic analysis. To estimate the economic benefit of improvement in water quality experienced by the residents residing in mid-and-downstream areas of the Han River, the choice experiment was employed with a pivot-style experimental design approach. In the empirical analysis, we converted the household perception for water quality grades into scientific water quality measures using Water Quality Standard to estimate the value of changes in water quality. To analyze the costs required to convert conventional highland farmlands into environment-friendly farmlands, we estimated the relevant cost of land acquisition and the subsidy necessary for farm income loss for organic agricultural practice. We find that the agri-environmental policy is economically viable, which suggests that converting conventional highland farming into environment-friendly farming would make the improvement in water quality visible.

The present study is designed to analyse how the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model is helping to create sustainable livelihood opportunities for women. It draws an inference from ‘Marudhara Rangsaaz’, a producer company operating in the textile sector in Rajasthan, India. It explains how this woman-based organisation operates in a PPP model to create economic value for women. It also tries to understand the specific role of the Rajasthan Grameen Aajeevika Vikas Parishad (RAJEEVIKA), The Rajasthan Government partner and ‘Rang Sutra’, the private partner, and the women members of ‘Marudhara Rangsaaz’ in the PPP model. The paper adopted a case study research design. The data was collected using in-depth interviews with all stakeholders and analysis of the documents. The findings indicate that in the said PPP model, Government took the role of mobilizer, financer, mentor, and private player, took the responsibility of building up capacity and arranging market links, and the women members worked together to help themselves sustain the project.

The rapidly growing construction industry often deals with complex and dynamic projects that pose significant safety risks. One of the state-owned companies in Indonesia is engaged in large-scale toll road construction projects with a high incidence of workplace accidents. This study aims to improve safety performance in toll road construction by implementing the Scrum framework. The study uses a System Dynamics approach to model interactions between the Scrum framework, project management, and work safety subsystems. Various scenarios were designed by modifying controlled variables and system structures, including introducing a punishment entity. These scenarios were evaluated based on their impact on reducing incidents and the incident rate over the project period. The results indicate that the combined scenario significantly reduces incidents and incident rates in different conditions. The study also finds a strong relationship between Scrum framework implementation and improved safety performance, demonstrating a reduction in incidents and incident rates by over 50% compared to existing conditions. This research underlines the effectiveness of the Scrum framework in enhancing safety in construction projects.

Finance is the core of the modern economy and the bloodline of the real economy; adherence to the people-centered value orientation and the financial services of the real economy as the fundamental purpose is an important connotation of the road of economic development with Chinese characteristics. Financial work is distinctly political and people-oriented, and must consciously practice the concept of the people, serve agricultural and rural development and farmers to increase their income and contribute to the common prosperity of farmers and rural areas. This study is based on the key factors affecting the multidimensional poverty of rural households—external rural financial resources availability and internal rural household entrepreneurship, rural household risk resilience, and rural household financial capability joint analysis. Based on financial exclusion theory, financial inclusion theory, poverty trap theory, and financial literacy theory, to build a logical framework between the rural financial resources availability, farmers’ financial capability, farmers’ entrepreneurship, farmers’ risk management capability, and farmers’ poverty, and then empirically explore the optimization mechanism of poverty reduction for farmers, and analyze the heterogeneity of the financial resources availability, to reduce the return to poverty caused by the lack of entrepreneurial motivation and the low level of risk resilience of rural households. The study aims to improve the farmers’ financial capability and promote sustainable and high-quality development of rural households. In this study, we modeled financial resource availability and rural household poverty using structural equations and surveyed rural households using a scale questionnaire. It was found that financial resource availability significantly affects rural household risk resilience, farmers’ entrepreneurship, and rural household poverty and that rural household risk resilience significance mediates the relationship between financial resource availability and rural household poverty, financial capability plays a significant moderating role. However, the mediating effect of farmers’ entrepreneurship on the availability of financial resources and farmers’ poverty is insignificant. Here, we put forward corresponding countermeasures and recommendations: guiding the allocation of financial resources to key areas and weak links; optimizing financial services; and building a long-term mechanism.

Given the large amount of railway maintenance work in China, whereas the maintenance time window is continuously compressed, this paper proposes a novel network model-based maintenance planning and optimization method, transforming maintenance planning and optimization into an integer linear programming problem. Based on the dynamic inspection data of track geometry, the evaluation index of maintenance benefit and the model of the decay and recovery of the track geometry are constructed. The optimization objective is to maximize the railway network’s overall performance index, considering budget constraint, maximum length constraint, maximum number of maintenance activities within one single period constraint, and continuity constraint. Using this method, the track units are divided into several maintenance activities at one time. The combination of surrounding track units can be considered for each maintenance activity, and the specific location, measure, time, cost, and benefit can be determined. Finally, a 100 km high-speed railway network case study is conducted to verify the model’s effectiveness in complex optimization scenarios. The results show that this method can output an objective maintenance plan; the combination of unit track sections can be considered to expand the scope of maintenance, share the maintenance cost and improve efficiency; the spatial-temporal integrated maintenance planning and optimization can be achieved to obtain the optimal global solution.