The present research focused on how environmental harshness may affect heterosexual women's preferences of potential male mates’ facial characteristics, namely masculinity–femininity. The evidence on this issue is mixed and mostly from Western samples. We aimed to provide causal evidence using a sample of Turkish women and Turkish male faces. A video-based manipulation was developed to heighten environmental harshness perceptions. In the main experiment, participants were primed with resource scarcity, pathogen prevalence or neither (control). They then saw masculinised vs. feminised versions of the same faces and indicated the face that they would prefer for a long-term relationship and separately rated the faces on various dimensions. In general, masculinised faces were perceived as slightly more attractive, slightly healthier and much more formidable. A multilevel Bayesian model showed that pathogen prevalence lowered the preference for masculinised faces while resource scarcity weakly elevated it. The overall drop in attractiveness ratings in cases of high perceived pathogen prevalence, one of the strongest effects we observed, suggests that during epidemics, the formation of new relationships is not a favourable strategy. Implications for evolutionary theories of mate preference are discussed.

North Korea today is a most unusual post-socialist state. Market actors and market prices are integral to economic life, but private property remains illegal, and private enterprise outside the household is de jure non-existent. In such an institutional context, some market processes are more autonomous in relation to the state, while others are more embedded within state structures. In this article, we offer a theoretical account of the shape that North Korea's market economy has taken, developed from a set of fishing industry case studies. We note four broad categories of enterprises: closely embedded, loosely embedded, semi-autonomous, and autonomous. By relative autonomy/embeddedness we mean control over fixed assets, cash flow, and operational decisions such as wage and price setting. We postulate three major determinants of embeddedness/autonomy: (1) relative strategic resource scarcity between state and market actors, (2) monitoring costs, and (3) institutional evolution that reflects these realities, though to varying extents.

Rural households in Ethiopia suffer from the scarcity of grazing land and water. This article examines the economic impact of time spent looking for water and grazing lands for livestock on crop farming labor and crop output based on a nonseparable farm household model. We estimated a general Cobb-Douglas production function using 518 farmers in Ethiopia. Our results confirm a negative relationship between labor input to crop farming and resource scarcity. On average, a 1% reduction in the time spent looking for water, grazing, and straw led to an increase in food production by 0.16%, 0.28% and 0.33%, respectively.

In this paper, I have explored the link between grazing and water resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure as a proxy for welfare and food security using distance and shadow price as a resource scarcity indicator in Northern Ethiopia based on a unique data set for 518 sample farmers. To address my objectives, I employed an IV 2SLS model for estimating welfare and probit for analyzing food security, drawing on a separable farm household model. My results confirmed the theoretical prediction that grazing and water affect households’ welfare and food security adversely, as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis.

During the farm crisis of the 1980s we began to better understand the inherent faults of an industrialized food system. Despite large gains in productivity, efficiency, and economies of size, thousands of farms were in foreclosure. Many farmers were overly extended in debt. Others were in trouble because of a combination of factors such as drought, low crop prices, high input prices, and the lack of competition in the marketplace. The end result was the loss of thousands of farmers and a subsequent decline in many rural communities.

At the same time, a new vision of an enduring agriculture emerged. It was called sustainable agriculture. This new paradigm became attractive because it focused on solutions to the problems of the day. Sustainable agriculture offered hope to farmers that were willing to differentiate their product and add value to it, deal with ecological costs by using sustainable best management practices, and work to create equity in food system employment. Forming new links with consumers is enabling farmers to set their prices, and consumers are willing to pay to know more about their food.