Economics, Business and Management: Recent Advances Vol. 4

Economics of Digital Agriculture: Profitability, Distribution and Public Value

Harkesh Kumar Balai — 2026-10-09

Digital agriculture encompasses technologies that collect information, support decisions, coordinate transactions and automate production. Their economic significance depends not simply on technical performance but on whether information changes feasible actions, whether benefits exceed implementation costs, and how gains are distributed. This critical narrative review integrates agricultural economics, development economics and innovation research, drawing on verified literature published from 2000 to 22 July 2026. Live scholarly searching, targeted searches of agricultural and economic indexes, and citation tracing informed a purposive comparison of experimental, observational, modelling and qualitative evidence. The synthesis distinguishes technical efficiency, farm profitability, household welfare and social value rather than treating them as interchangeable outcomes. Randomised studies demonstrate that some digital advisory interventions improve practices, yields or profits, but null findings and small absolute effects remain consequential. Precision farming and automation can be economically attractive under particular production conditions, although results depend on scale, utilisation, complementary skills, supervision requirements and the treatment of capital costs. Recent field observations challenge assumptions that autonomous machinery necessarily reduces total human labour or removes disadvantages associated with small fields. Market platforms can improve selected prices or consumer access without consistently increasing producer incomes. Data reuse and lower transaction costs create opportunities for innovation, while contractual restrictions, market concentration and unequal connectivity can alter who captures the resulting surplus. Environmental benefits require separate assessment because reduced input intensity does not establish lower aggregate resource use or improved ecosystem outcomes. A unifying conclusion is that digital agriculture is an institutional and organisational investment as much as a technological one. Evaluation should therefore prioritise complete economic costs, sustained use, distributional effects, credible counterfactuals and environmental additionality. Public support is most defensible where it addresses demonstrable infrastructure, information or coordination failures and remains accountable to measured outcomes rather than technology adoption alone.

Digital Public Infrastructure for Agriculture: Implications for Extension, Markets, Finance and Smallholder Inclusion

Harkesh Kumar Balai — 2026-10-09

Digital public infrastructure is attracting attention as a means of connecting agricultural services that have developed as separate applications, databases and delivery programmes. Its relevance to smallholders depends not simply on digitising transactions, but on whether reusable systems improve access, service quality and bargaining opportunities without creating new exclusions or dependencies. This critical narrative review examines evidence on digital extension, agricultural markets, rural finance and data governance, distinguishing evaluated services from the infrastructure through which they might eventually operate. Literature published from January 2000 to 22 July 2026 was considered through targeted searches of open scholarly records, publisher and institutional repositories, and authoritative policy sources. Experimental studies support benefits from some advisory, payment and market interventions, but effects vary with information relevance, complementary resources, service design and household circumstances. Improvements in knowledge or adoption do not consistently translate into higher profits, while gains from financial access may occur through livelihood diversification rather than agricultural intensification. Evidence directly identifying the additional benefits of interoperable agricultural infrastructure remains substantially thinner than evidence about individual digital services. Farmer registries, shared data exchange and payment systems can lower repeated verification and coordination burdens, but these mechanisms remain conditional on data quality, workable correction procedures, competition and reliable human assistance. Land-linked registration, household-level targeting and data-intensive financial assessment require particular scrutiny because technical inclusion can coexist with unequal control over resources and information. The review develops an analytical distinction between service effectiveness, infrastructure additionality and distributional legitimacy. It argues for evaluating these separately rather than treating enrolment, transaction counts or data integration as proxies for welfare. Research priorities include comparative tests of shared versus stand-alone service delivery, longitudinal assessment of exclusion and indebtedness, and full-cost evaluation of maintenance and redress. Agricultural digital public infrastructure is best understood as a governed institutional arrangement whose public value must be demonstrated, not as an intrinsically inclusive technology.

The Transformation and Breakthrough Path of the China's Credit Card Industry

Shuyue Luo — 2026-10-09

During the 14^th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), China's credit card industry entered a period of substantial adjustment under tighter regulation, rising asset-quality pressure, changing consumer payment behaviour, and weaker retail profitability. This study examines publicly disclosed annual reports and official disclosures of selected joint-stock commercial banks together with regulatory, statistical, industry, and peer-reviewed academic sources. A structured documentary comparison is applied across three outcome dimensions-card issuance scale, usage behaviour, and operating performance-and five transformation dimensions: customer acquisition quality, scenario-based operations, technology enablement, value-chain extension, and cost optimisation. National data show that the number of credit cards and combined credit/debit cards declined from 807 million in the third quarter of 2022 to 687 million in the first quarter of 2026. Bank-level disclosures also indicate substantial heterogeneity in transaction activity, asset quality, and retail profitability. Across the documentary evidence, recurring transformation approaches include more selective customer acquisition, ecosystem-based operations, technology-enabled risk management and service, integration with broader retail banking, and cost optimisation. Because disclosure practices and indicator definitions differ across banks, the findings are descriptive rather than causal. The paper concludes with implications for business positioning, customer management, organisational coordination, and technology-enabled risk control during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.

Farmer Producer Organisations and Smallholder Transformation: Economics of Collective Action, Market Access and Bargaining Power

Harkesh Kumar Balai — 2026-10-09

Farmer producer organisations are promoted as a means of overcoming the disadvantages of small-scale production without requiring the consolidation of landholdings. Their economic justification is persuasive, but the relationship between collective ownership, stronger market power and durable improvements in smallholder welfare remains conditional. This critical narrative review examines that relationship, with India as the principal setting and international cooperative evidence used for analytical comparison. Literature selection combined searches of agricultural and economic indexes, regional scholarly sources and institutional materials, covering publications through 22 July 2026. The synthesis distinguishes transaction-cost savings, productive coordination and access to services from the redistribution of bargaining power and the retention of benefits by members. Evidence supports the capacity of functioning organisations to improve selected marketing, input-access and farm-performance outcomes. It is less conclusive about population-wide impacts, the causal effects of particular governance arrangements, and sustained transformation after external support ends. Positive membership associations coexist with weak commercial participation, uneven financial performance and substantial differences between commodities and organisational forms. Working capital, credible payment commitments and usable alternative buyers connect internal organisational capability to external bargaining strength. Formal inclusion does not necessarily produce equitable service access, women’s decision-making authority or gains for the least-resourced producers. A conditional synthesis is developed in which value creation, value retention and distribution must each be demonstrated rather than inferred from registration, turnover or membership. Policy evaluation should therefore combine member-level net benefits with enterprise cash-flow performance, market-wide spillovers and distributional outcomes. Longitudinal cohort studies, transaction-level evidence and mechanism-specific evaluations are priorities. Farmer producer organisations are best understood as potentially valuable, but institutionally demanding, arrangements for smallholder coordination rather than as a uniformly superior organisational solution.

Financing the Green Agricultural Transition: Credit Constraints, Green Finance and Incentives for Sustainable Technology Adoption

Sarita Meena — 2026-10-09

The green agricultural transition requires investment in practices that can improve environmental performance while sustaining farm livelihoods. Yet financing is frequently treated as a sufficient explanation for adoption, despite differences between short-term liquidity shortages, uninsured risk, uncertain private returns and uncompensated public benefits. This critical narrative review integrates agricultural development economics, sustainable finance and environmental incentive research to examine when credit, risk-sharing instruments and environmental payments can support sustained technology adoption. Literature published from 2008 to 1 August 2026 was selected through targeted scholarly searching, citation tracing and bibliographic verification. Evidence was differentiated by research design, unit of analysis, adoption stage and environmental outcome. Randomised agricultural finance experiments demonstrate that seasonal liquidity, payment timing and risk allocation can affect investment, but many measure input use or production rather than environmental improvement. Conversely, studies explicitly labelled as agricultural green finance frequently rely on aggregate observational indicators that do not identify farm-level causal mechanisms. Environmental payment experiments provide more direct evidence, including the importance of advancing funds before farmers incur compliance costs. However, initial participation is not equivalent to persistent adoption, and practice adoption does not guarantee additional environmental benefits. Carbon payments face further constraints arising from measurement uncertainty, baseline selection, permanence and transaction costs. An integrated interpretation distinguishes financing, which shifts resources across time, from funding, which determines who ultimately pays for environmental services. It supports matching instruments to demonstrable constraints rather than maximising labelled lending volumes. Seasonal credit, service-based access, credible risk sharing and targeted environmental payments can be complementary, but their combination requires evaluation of farmer welfare, public subsidy costs and independently measured environmental outcomes. Priority research should connect financial contracts to multi-season adoption and landscape-scale impacts while examining distributional effects. Green agricultural finance is most defensible as a conditional institutional arrangement, not a presumption that additional capital is inherently sustainable.

Digital Transformation of Agribusiness: Business Models, Value Creation, and the Future of Agri-Food Enterprises

Anand Siramdas — 2026-10-09

Digital transformation is changing agribusiness through connected data, analytics, automation, platforms and digitally enabled relationships across production, processing, distribution and retail. Yet much of the literature equates technology adoption with transformation and infers business value from technical capability rather than demonstrating how value is created, delivered, captured and distributed. This critical narrative review examines digital transformation as a strategic and organisational process in agri-food enterprises, with particular attention to business-model innovation, enterprise performance, platform and data governance, resilience, sustainability and inclusion. Literature published from 1 January 2010 to 10 July 2026 was identified through multidisciplinary and agriculture-, management- and economics-oriented scholarly sources, supplemented by citation searching and bibliographic verification. Seminal earlier business-model research was retained where conceptually necessary. The synthesis indicates that the strongest evidence concerns digitally enabled process optimisation, information and coordination efficiencies, market access, traceability and selected supply-chain outcomes. Evidence that digitalisation consistently produces superior long-run financial, environmental or resilience outcomes is less mature and is concentrated in case studies, cross-sectional research and listed-firm panels from a limited set of countries. Digital technologies are therefore best understood as enabling infrastructures rather than business models in themselves. Business-model transformation occurs when firms redesign interdependent activities, revenue and contracting logics, customer interfaces, service propositions, ecosystem roles or rules governing data and complementors. Platforms and data-intensive models can expand coordination and service scope, but may also redistribute value towards technology intermediaries and generate dependence, opacity and lock-in. A framework is developed that links digital foundations, analytical capability, work redesign, business-model architecture, ecosystem governance and outcome distribution. The review concludes that the future competitiveness of agri-food enterprises will depend less on the possession of individual technologies than on their ability to combine digital assets with organisational capabilities, interoperable institutions and credible arrangements for data rights, value sharing and accountability.

The Future of Agribusiness Management: AI, Climate Resilience, Circularity, Digital Markets, and Sustainable Value Creation

Anand Siramdas — 2026-10-09

Agribusiness management is entering a period in which competitive performance can no longer be separated from climate exposure, digital capability, resource productivity and the distribution of value across supply-chain actors. This critical narrative review examines how artificial intelligence, climate resilience, circularity, digital markets and sustainable business-model innovation are reshaping managerial choices in agrifood systems. Literature was selected through live scholarly searching and bibliographic verification, with emphasis on peer-reviewed evidence published from 2015 to 10 July 2026 and inclusion of earlier foundational studies where conceptually necessary. The evidence indicates that these domains should not be treated as independent technology or sustainability agendas. Artificial intelligence can improve sensing, prediction and targeting, yet field-level sustainability gains remain context dependent and are constrained by data quality, interoperability, skills, ownership and power asymmetries. Climate resilience requires redundancy, diversity, adaptability and transformative capacity, which can conflict with short-term efficiency objectives. Circularity can convert losses and by-products into resources, but outcomes depend on life-cycle boundaries, quality assurance, logistics and viable markets. Digital platforms can reduce information and coordination frictions while simultaneously concentrating control over data, standards and market access. Sustainable value creation therefore depends on business models capable of combining financial viability with environmental integrity, resilience and fair participation. An integrated management architecture is proposed around five linked functions: sense, decide, coordinate, regenerate and account. The review argues that future agribusiness advantage is more likely to arise from orchestrating these complementary capabilities than from adopting individual technologies in isolation. Priority research needs include longitudinal causal evaluation, interoperable data governance, resilience-adjusted performance measurement, distributional impact assessment and comparative evidence from smallholder and emerging-market contexts.