In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004, and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields.

This special issue on gender comprises articles from four different country settings: Sierra Leone, Senegal, Bangladesh, and Albania. Each uses large secondary data sets to explore how changing market and institutional environments affect gender attitudes and outcomes. In spite of the many historical and contemporary differences in these four economies, we see common difficulties in achieving gender equality.

The Mesoamerican Agroenvironmental Program (MAP-Norway) is a multi-dimensional rural development program implemented in Central America since 2009, working with smallholder families, producer organizations, governmental organizations, and regional governance platforms. To monitor, assess, and evaluate the effects of the program on its beneficiaries, MAP-Norway uses a series of indicators that allow project managers and donors to adapt and follow-up on the interventions.

Since the beginning of the decade, climate resilient green economy strategies have been proposed in many African countries. One of the pillars of the strategies is the adoption and diffusion of various climate smart agricultural practices for improving crop and livestock production and farmer income while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The effects of these innovations on household nutritional security, including gender-differentiated nutritional status, have hardly been analyzed.

Our Beijing‐based laboratory experiment investigated gender differences in competitive choices across different birth‐cohorts experiencing – during their crucial developmental‐age – different institutions and social norms. To control for general time trends, we use Taipei counterpart subjects with identical original Confucian traditions. Our findings confirm that exposure to different institutions/norms during crucial developmental‐ages significantly changes individuals’ behaviour.

This paper uses survey and experimental data from prison inmates and comparable
non-inmates to examine the drivers of rising criminality in China. We find that China’s
high sex ratios are associated with greater risk-taking, greater impatience and greater
neuroticism amongst males. These underlying behavioural impacts explain some part
of the increase in criminality. The primary avenue through which the sex ratio increases
crime, however, is the direct pressure on men to appear financially attractive in order