Agriculture and Rural Development as a Main Objective of Polish Cooperation and Development Aid for the Republic of Moldova

Agriculture and development of rural areas are important sectors of Polish-Moldovan cooperation and development aid. Importantly, both of them constitute structural problems, similar to those which faced agriculture in Poland in the 1990s. Through Polish aid and development cooperation, various measures are initiated which increase the competitiveness of Moldovan agricultural production, improve sanitary and phytosanitary conditions, bring technological innovations in agricultural farms, ensure modernization of rural infrastructure, providing support to small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, cooperatives, and agricultural consultants, along with professional activation of the Republic’s residents.

How Does Sustainable Rural Tourism Cause Rural Community Development?

Rural tourism has been developing vigorously, and rural community functions are becoming diversified in China. Therefore, this paper takes China as an example to explore how sustainable rural tourism affects rural community development in the long and short run over the period 1994–2020. Sustainable rural tourism can be measured using two indicators: total rural tourism revenue and number of rural tourists. Rural community development is measured by the number of rural community service institutions. Then, by incorporating other variables and using the autoregressive distributed lag bounds co-integration technique to perform an empirical analysis, we found that, whether in the long or short run, sustainable rural tourism always plays a positive and significant role in promoting rural community development. In particular, in the long run, rural infrastructure construction, rural ecological environment, agricultural fiscal expenditure, agricultural technological progress, and rural human capital are identified as the major forces behind rural community development. Meanwhile, in the short run, rural infrastructure construction, rural ecological environment, agricultural fiscal expenditure, agricultural technological progress, and rural human capital are also major drivers of rural community development. This paper contributes to the current literature by filling in the existing gaps in several aspects.

Evaluation of Post-Construction Communal Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) in Sleman District, Special Region of Yogyakarta

The Special Region of Yogyakarta Government took one step to improve access to proper sanitation for the community through the Communal WWTP. There are four communal WWTP procurement programs in Sleman District: Community-based Sanitation, Urban Sanitation Rural Infrastructure (USRI), Special Allocation Fund and Community-based Environmental Sanitation. After the Communal WWTP was built and operated, various problems indicate the Communal WWTP has not run optimally after construction. Therefore, this study evaluated thirteen Communal WWTPs in Sleman District after construction was carried out. The aspects reviewed in this study were the administrator institutional and the management’s performance using the scoring method. The evaluation results based on the administrator institutional aspect and the management’s performance showed that Ambarketawang WWTP had less performance with a total score of 16. At the same time, other WWTPs got the optimal category with a total score more than equal to 25. These results indicate that the Community-Based Environmental Sanitation procurement program was considered less than optimal because the Ambarketawang WWTP did not keep Communal WWTP documentation and had no maintenance Standard Operational Procedure (SOP). The administrators did not also understand the main tasks and functions as administrators.

Availability and Spatial Inequality of Rural Infrastructure in Jungle Mahal Blocks of Purulia District, India

Rural infrastructure is fundamental and central to the concept of quality of life as well as human development. The major characteristic of regional development is the constant widening of regional disparity in India after different plan period. Various Finance Commissions and Planning Commissions laid emphasis on the objective of achieving balanced regional development. The article identifies a gap in terms of education, health, communication and financial infrastructure in the study of panchayats of Jungle Mahal blocks. Mapping of regional disparities can aid in effective policymaking at the preliminary stage of planning. Panchayat level inequality has been analysing using dimension index and principal component analysis (PCA). Wide disparities in the availability of rural infrastructure have been pointed out and proper recommendation has also been made to minimise the gap in spatial inequality.