Search results for "Commodity"
showing 10 items of 52 documents
Green and good? The investment performance of US environmental mutual funds
2011
Increased concern for the environment has increased the number of investment opportunities in mutual funds specialized in promoting responsible environmental attitudes. This article examines the performance and risk sensitivities of US green mutual funds vis-a-vis their conventional peers. We also analyze and compare this performance relative to other socially responsible investing (SRI) mutual funds. In order to implement this analysis, we apply a CAPM-based methodology and find that in the 1987–2009 period, environ- mental funds had lower performance than conventional funds with similar characteristics. However, if we focus on a more recent period (2001–2009), green funds achieved adjuste…
Hedging effectiveness of European wheat futures markets
2014
The instability of commodity prices and the hypothesis that speculative behaviour was one of its causes has brought renewed interest in futures markets. In this paper, the hedging effectiveness of European and US wheat futures markets were studied to test whether they were affected by the high price instability after 2007. Implicitly, this is a test of whether the increasing presence of speculation in futures markets have made them divorced from the physical markets. A multivariate GARCH model was applied to compute optimal hedging ratios. No important evidence was found of a change in the effectiveness of hedging after 2007.
The ARYA crop yield forecasting algorithm: Application to the main wheat exporting countries
2021
Abstract Wheat is the most important commodity traded in the international food market. Thus, accurate and timely information on wheat production can help mitigate food price fluctuations. Within the existing operational regional and global scale agricultural monitoring systems that provide information on global crop yield and area forecasts, there are still fundamental gaps: #1. Lack of quantitative Earth Observation (EO) derived crop information, #2. Lack of global but detailed (national or subnational level) and timely crop production forecasts and #3. Lack of information on forecast uncertainties. In this study we present the Agriculture Remotely-sensed Yield Algorithm (ARYA) an EO-base…
Patterns of Regional Income Distribution in Uruguay (1872–2012): A Story of Agglomeration, Natural Resources and Public Policies
2020
In this chapter, we provide a new data set of regional GDP and GDP per capita for Uruguay between 1870 and 2012. As regards the long-term evolution of regional inequality, we find evidence of a persistent decline from the last third of the nineteenth century up to the 1960s with a strong reversal of the process from then on. The first decade of the twenty-first century, however, shows a new decreasing trend in regional inequality. Montevideo has represented a large share, both demographically and economically, over time as consequence of a privileged access to sea and the fact that the city was built around a natural port with excellent conditions. In addition, agglomeration forces identifi…
Assessing commodity price risks and terms of trade exposures in emerging and developing countries
2020
This paper provides novel evidence on commodity exposure (impacts of commodity price and terms of trade fluctuations) amongst 46 emerging and developing countries (EMDCs) in Africa, Asia and the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region. We focus on the exposures of six macroeconomic variables to the commodity prices and terms of trade, based on the real business cycle (RBC) theory. Our empirical results indicate that, overall, about 10% of the macroeconomic variation amongst the EMDCs is due to commodity market-related exposures. The Asian and LAC economies are especially sensitive to changes in commodity prices. The changes in the prices of world trade have an imminent impact on non-commo…
Navigation Acts and the integration of North Baltic shipping in the early nineteenth century
2017
This article discusses how Navigation Acts affected shipping and commodity trade from and to the Northern Baltic during the early nineteenth century. We use Finnish shipping and foreign trade as an example of trade integration at the time. Finland can be used as a ‘laboratory case’ to study the importance of the Navigation Acts, as the eastern part of the area followed Russian legislation without the Navigation Act to restrict shipping to domestic vessels, while the western part followed Swedish legislation with strict protection through the Swedish version of the Act ( Produktplakat). The article argues that the role played by foreign vessels in shipments of Finnish export goods was far m…
Regionalna specjalizacja produkcji rolnej w Polsce
2016
Agriculture is a very specific sector of the economy, significantly different from other economic activities. One of the main distinguishing characteristics of agricultural production is its nature and strong dependence on the environmental conditions. These conditions determine to a large extent, the nature of agricultural production and its structure (crop/animal). The accession of Poland to the EU in 2004 and access to EU funds (subsidies for farmers under different EU programs) often were the cause of change in the current profile of farm activities. Therefore, it seems reasonable to examine the changes in the specialization of agricultural production in Poland after 2004. The aim of th…
Global factors, uncertainty, weather conditions and energy prices: On the drivers of the duration of commodity price cycle phases
2020
We investigate the role of global factors in explaining the length of commodity price cycle phases, using a continuous-time Weibull duration model and data for a panel of 33 countries over the period 1980Q1-2015Q4. We find evidence of increasing (constant) positive duration dependence for commodity price booms and busts (normal time spells). Global macroeconomic conditions - in particular, inflation, economic policy uncertainty and monetary policy actions - significantly affect the duration of all commodity price cycle phases. Global environmental conditions also impact the duration of commodity price booms, with a rise in average temperature (rainfall) increasing (reducing) their length. A…
Understanding the shortcomings of commodity-based technology in input-output models: an economic-circuit approach
2004
International audience; The Make-Use Model serves as a basis for most national accounting systems as the System of National Accounts (SNA) and is acknowledged as the most suitable model for interregional analysis. Two hypotheses are traditionally made featuring either industry-based technologies (IBT) or commodity-based technologies (CBT). While industry-based technologies can be easily interpreted in terms of a demand-driven economic circuit, it will be shown that: (1) commodity-based technologies cannot be interpreted as a demand-driven economic circuit because this involves computing the inverse of a matrix (the matrix of industry output proportions), which is either impossible or genera…
Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: a Polanyian reading of the 'digital economy'
2020
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the attempts to use Karl Polanyi's framework to make sense of current developments have multiplied, producing a noticeable and lively debate. This debate centres on the notion of double movement put forward by the Hungarian thinker in his masterpiece – The Great Transformation. The paper is a contribution to this debate. The first part addresses a series of questions that make the interpretations of the double movement advanced so far not very compelling. To this end, a close reading of Polanyi's text, with the aim of dismantling and rearticulating its analytical structure, is carried out. The upshot is a dynamic and multistage picture of the double process …