Can Cooperative Supports and Adoption of Improved Technologies Help Increase Agricultural Income? Evidence from a Recent Study
, Ram L. Ray 2, Hazem S. Kassem 3, Muhammad Ihtisham 4, Badar Naseem Siddiqui 5 and Shemei Zhang 1,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This study aimed to evaluate the influence of cooperative supports (CS) and technology adoption (TA) on wheat productivity in Pakistan. Overall, the article was well structured and the methodologies were scientifically sound.
However, major revisions should be made before the acceptance. The authors used almost three pages to introduce the study and describe the background. I suggest that Section 1 (Introduction) to Section 2 (Literature Review) should be combined and polished, as most of the context is repeated, making it not easy to follow.
Section 3 (Conceptual Framework of the Study) should be merged into Section 4 (Research Methodology) or even removed. Furthermore, there were not sufficient discussions in this article and the conclusions were not concise. Please expand your discussions in Section 5 and shorten Section 6 (Conclusion Policy Recommendations and Limitations).
In addition, what were your criteria to distinguish CS vs. non-CS and TA vs. non-TA in this study? I am afraid that I missed them in the article.
Author Response
We are very grateful for your valuable time, constructive comments, and suggestions to help improve the quality of the manuscript.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Some careless use of words rather spoils the work, such as taking income and revenue as synonyms, and referring often to productivity but never using it in its usual technical sense. Some illustrations of this carelessness are listed below. The Conclusion does admit to some weaknesses but not the crudity of the “technology adoption” measure used with partial definition as “use of modern cultivars and fertilizer” but never really fully explained in the paper.
Line comment
3 insert “a” after “from”
19 omit “the variance in”
24 omit “productivity”
31-33 omit final sentence as unwarranted commentary
69-70 first sentence is repetitive
73-75 this sentence is strange
77-81 omit the repetitive text
107 “new” is hardly true
118-41 less than profound observations
145 “essential” is an overstatement
150-60 this is a quite inadequate history of agricultural cooperatives
179 “essential” is untrue
184 further overuse of “essential” when it is the wrong word
202 this repetition is quite unnecessary
210 Figure 1 is by no means an informative conceptual “framework”
231 “seedlings” is incorrect
231-33 omit as irrelevant
235 “were” not “was”
256 “technology adoption” is mentioned but precisely how it is assessed as a 0 or 1 variable is never disclosed in this paper
274 this statement is literally untrue
279 OLS is never defined
280-315 all the Greek-heavy equations leave this reader with the impression that the authors perhaps are not aware of the realism of the many distributional assumptions being introduced in a seemingly “statistical package” approach to analysis
325 it makes no apparent sense for an income to be a %
334 there is no explanation of the use of logarithmic transformations used for several variables or what is done for cases where the underlying value is zero (as in cases of no loans)
337 the claim of no multicollinearity seems unrealistic
360 yet another inappropriate use of “essential”
365 one of several misuses of “optimistic”
373 the scheme adopted for naming the variables makes reading Tables 4 & 5 a sort of puzzle
382 here and in most mentions (e.g., also 385, 471 & 476) “productivity” is being misused and should better not be included
415 a sentence obscure in meaning
423 Table 6 features many non-significant digits
465 ”Holding”??
476 “reliable”??
482 “outcomes” seems the wrong word for what are, at best, predictions of averaged partial effects
492 “is not credible”?? sense unclear
500 “gratified”??
520 “the probability”??
521 “by controlling the heterogeneous selection bias of farmers” would seem best omitted
525 “expand agricultural productivity” is actually not examined in this paper so should not appear in the Conclusion
534 The use here of “productivity” is, again, not appropriate as it was not examined per se
536 This expressed opinion seems quite unsubstantiated
543 “the strengthen”??
538-52 the various “policy recommendations” (from Pakistan to UN) are not really derived from the paper per se so hardly justify being in a Conclusion
557 ”deliberate”??
566 you say the study “only absorbed agricultural productivity”; absorbed is clearly the wrong word but as noted above, the work did not explicitly deal with productivity at all!
References. Many are acceptable and of conventional style but for some the strange form (of indicating the journal by means of abbreviations, conflated with the initials of the last-mentioned author) is not acceptable.
Author Response
We are very grateful for your valuable time, constructive comments, and suggestions to help improve the quality of the manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I recommend this revised manuscript to be published in Land.
Author Response
We sincerely thank the reviewer for taking the time to review and making excellent suggestions.
Thank you.
Reviewer 2 Report
The attached Word document includes comments and a marked up Abstract
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
We sincerely thank the reviewer for taking the time to review and making excellent suggestions.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
