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Along most of the 2005–2019 period, Uruguay experienced an impressive economic growth. The country extended its public policies across industrial, technological, and social domains. However, there was a dearth of significant structural changes, constraining Uruguay’s ability to embark on a sustained developmental trajectory. Our findings reveal that the majority of implemented policies were designed to enhance competitiveness and build capabilities horizontally, rather than promoting structural changes. This allows us to discuss the dynamic nature of developmental processes marked by increasing policy challenges. In doing so, we stress the relevance of policy support and coordination to sustain inclusive growth processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the process by which an organisation creates a historical narrative about itself as a strategy to legitimise the role it plays in a particular society. By using the concept of 'public good' as our analytical lens, we show that when the organisation creates a narrative that coincides with that of the nation-state, this poses enormous challenges to the organisation's efforts to control how and by whom this narrative is used. This is because anyone belonging to the nation-state can legitimately make use of that narrative. Therefore, the boundary conditions that permit other actors to use these historical narratives are delimited by those able to define who belongs to the nation-state and who does not. We illustrate our argument with the rhetorical strategies developed by Colombia's Coffee Growers Federation (FNCC) between 1927 and 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractFaced with a more multipolar world, scholars of International Political Economy are sharpening their tools to make sense of the longue durée of post-colonial institutions, international financial subordination and the quest for self-determination. This article develops the notion of ‘earnest struggles’ in Senegal’s postcolonial history and shows that successive governments have indeed tried to move their country forward against the odds. The focus is on three struggles: First, the attempts at transforming the Senegalese economy away from colonial cash crops and the influence of the French from 1960 to 1980. Second, the struggle of grappling with Global South debt crisis and the devaluation of the Franc CFA by 50% between 1980 to 2004. Third, the struggle to expand the Senegalese economy with newfound fiscal space and novel forms of external debt since international debt relief in 2004 until today. Based on financial data and interviews in Dakar and Paris, I argue that these struggles have led to some structural transformation. However, the danger of debt crisis has not gone, and economic self-determination has remained precarious. Dependence on foreign finance has stayed and reached record levels in recent years. Relative delinking and the search for regional complementarities offers a more promising avenue to break out of the structural condition of international financial subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' famously calls for new forms of representation that can provide a better notion of the sublime world space of multinational capital. Jameson states that such aesthetic scale models are yet unrealised, but this essay argues that a number of contemporary novels, including Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Ben Lerner's 10:04 and works by Matias Faldbakken, Sally Rooney and William Gibson, present us with global figurations that are both more banal and more sublime than Jameson could have imagined. These novels all contain scenes where ordinary commodities are turned inside out in staggering leaps of scale, which constitute original figurations of the global infrastructures of late capitalism. Drawing on Bill Brown's thing theory, Jennifer Wenzel's notion of commodity biographies, and different theories of scale in the Anthropocene, I analyse different examples of this figure, which I term transparent commodities. In the concluding section, I show how these figurations prefigure the current global supply chain crisis, and I return to Jameson's original demand for representations of the global totality, which I discuss in dialogue with my analyses as well as theories of planetarity by Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Benjamin's criticisms of dwelling and the modern interior are well known. The middle classes retreated from the alienation of nineteenth-century city life into domestic seclusion, surrounding themselves with soft furnishings in a search for comfort. In Living Rooms (2022), Sam Johnson-Schlee uses objects typically found in the living room or lounge as his starting point for the development of Benjamin's ideas. Recognising the labour invested in domestic commodities would allow us to realise our dreams of connecting with others and escaping the confines of capitalism like roots breaking out of a plant pot. The personal observations used to support the arguments reflect the experience of Generation Rent. They inform an attempt to relate IKEA's 1996 'Chuck out that chintz!' advert to crucial changes in the British housing market. The emphasis on labour largely sidelines household labour and its gendering, with the exception of the activities of 'cleanfluencer' Mrs. Hinch. The link between domestic commodities and our longing for intimacy is effectively depicted using a combination of historical research, cultural references and family stories. Plants and flowers are used throughout to illustrate specific arguments and to serve as a symbol of a different, and better, life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a class of semi-parametric dynamic models with iid errors, including the nonlinear mixed causal-noncausal Vector Autoregressive (VAR), Double-Autoregressive (DAR) and stochastic volatility models. To estimate the parameters characterizing the (nonlinear) serial dependence, we introduce a generic Generalized Covariance (GCov) estimator, which minimizes a residual-based multivariate portmanteau statistic. In comparison to the standard methods of moments, the GCov estimator has an interpretable objective function, circumvents the inversion of high-dimensional matrices, and achieves semi-parametric efficiency in one step. We derive the asymptotic properties of the GCov estimator and show its semi-parametric efficiency. We also prove that the associated residual-based portmanteau statistic is asymptotically chi-square distributed. The finite sample performance of the GCov estimator is illustrated in a simulation study. The estimator is then applied to a dynamic model of commodity futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to delve into the development of the region's financial fragility and economic instability process in an environment where, in the absence of the United States, other agents such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the growing presence of China, have emerged. An inflationary environment, high indebtedness, and rising interest rates in the short term are placing countries of the region to the limit due to the lack of a full employment policy given the burden of servicing external debt and the need to import food, fertilizers, and fuel. This situation prioritizes institutional investors who play a determining role in the economic development of the African region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the dynamic asset allocation problem faced by an infinitively lived commodity-based sovereign wealth fund under incomplete markets. Assuming that the fund receives a non-tradable stream of commodity revenues until a predetermined date, the optimal consumption and investment strategies are state and time-dependent. Using data from the Norwegian Petroleum Fund, we find that the optimal demand for equity should decrease gradually from 60% to 40% over the next 60 years. However, the solution is particularly sensitive to the correlation between oil and stock price changes. We also estimate wealth-equivalent welfare losses, relative to the optimal rule, when following alternative suboptimal investment rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continued conversion of tropical forests to agriculture risks jeopardising planetary integrity. The UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets to halt deforestation by 2020, alongside other global measures for zero deforestation, were not achieved. Applying a governmentality lens, we aim to better understand global governance mechanisms for tropical forests and sustainable food systems, and identify opportunities to improve them post 2020. We rely on data from global measures, institutions, and interviews with public and private actors working on tropical forest and food policy to undertake a discourse analysis of the (i) SDGs and other global measures on forests and food systems, (ii) contexts of the institutions studied, and (iii) implementation of global measures relating to forests and sustainable food systems. Our analysis reveals six discursive themes: (1) Policy framing of tropical forests – a token effort (2) Deceptive interlinkages, (3) Participation of the usual suspects, (4) Insufficient stakeholder representation, (5) Cleaning up supply chains and, (6) A green recovery. The themes show how the promotion and reproduction of neoliberal values of tropical forests consistently inhibit conservation, negatively impacting on planetary integrity. We identify opportunities to shift towards a new governmentality for informing international efforts on tackling tropical deforestation post-2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa is a major commodity exporter, yet it is not clear what impact volatility in commodity prices has on the volatility of its currency. In this study, we examine whether a comprehensive sample of commodities (metals, grains and energy) transmit (or receive) volatility spillovers to (from) the rand exchange rate against the United States dollar for the period January 2000 to May 2022. This study uses the dynamic connectedness and volatility spillover approach of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2014) and Gabauer (2020). Our findings highlight the rand as a net receiver of volatility from almost every commodity examined, with silver and palladium exhibiting the strongest volatility spillover onto the rand. From a transmission perspective, there is some evidence that the rand can be considered a commodity currency for metal exports but there may also be other channels to explain the impact of these commodities on the currency. The results have important implications for policymakers, currency traders and hedgers in commodity markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the volatility risk premium (VRP) in the oil market. We approach the problem from the practitioner's perspective as an investment strategy that sells and delta-hedges oil options, paying particular attention to the strategy's risk-adjusted returns and its drawdown characteristics. The results are differentiated across options with different moneyness and expirations and presented in the form of VRP smile and VRP term structure. Strategy results are analyzed using alternative delta-hedging techniques that vary hedging frequencies, hedging thresholds, and volatilities used to calculate options' delta. We discuss the performance under different regimes and highlight the structural break driven by the changing behavior among main participants in the oil options market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the United States economy shifted to post-Fordist production models in the late twentieth century, the athletic apparel industry (specifically the brands Nike, Adidas, and Reebok) modified its promotional strategies. Whereas the industry traditionally touted the materiality and functionality of its products, the 1980s saw a substantial increase in marketing that aimed to inculcate products with symbolic characteristics and popular cultural associations. In particular, the industry deployed Black culture, and competed to associate their products with Black athletes, styles, and cultural signifiers. While this modification in promotional tactics yielded unprecedented growth for the industry, the images and messages communicated in this marketing served to exploit Black communities and reinforce the rampant biological and cultural racisms of the Reagan era. Engaging primary accounts from newspapers, magazines, interviews, advertisements, archival catalogues, and oral histories, this paper traces the historical shift towards racialized marketing through the athletic apparel industry's quintessential commodity: the athletic sneaker. Overall, I argue that scholarly analyses of technology must critically engage how goods are promoted and distributed in order to holistically comprehend the social, cultural, and political implications of sporting technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research presents the Enhanced Commodity Forward Buy (ECFB) heuristic, a new method for commodity purchasing, which allows strategic forward buying of commodities for products that include commodity components or materials. The ECFB addresses limitations of existing methods by considering stochastic demand and stochastic commodity prices for products that contain both commodity and non-commodity materials. We conduct a simulation test of the new heuristic on 10 commodity indices using actual historical market prices, over a range of holding costs, markup margins, commodity percentages of the product’s cost of goods sold and demand distributions. The results of the simulation show that compared with five other buying methods, the ECFB heuristic’s ability to adapt to variations in both demand and commodity prices allows it to generate higher profits when demand is uncertain and commodity prices are volatile. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the evolution of branded commodity advertising and consumption from corporeal health concerns to the racialisation of beauty through skin-lightening cosmetics in late colonial India. It centres two empirical foci: the marketing of personal hygiene products to Indian markets, and their racialised and gendered consumption. This article argues that the imperial economy tapped into and commodified ideals of cleanliness, beauty and fairness through marketing—ideals that continue to pervade contemporary South Asian communities. Contrary to claims that multinational corporations permeated Indian markets after the economic liberalisation of the late 1980s, there is a much deeper genealogy to the racialised imperial economy operating in European colonies. This article also examines the phenomenological underpinnings of imperial whiteness in colonial encounters to demonstrate how certain commodities appealed to Indians as 'modern' consumers, as well as how middle-class Indians and local entrepreneurs became active participants in the demand for, consumption and production of personal hygiene commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our theory of 'the civilized commodity' examines 'mob violence' affecting high-value commodities, including the vanilla boom of Madagascar. We illustrate producers' labor under fraught conditions of violence and contradictory claims of 'street justice.' Specifically we ask, what counts as justice and to whom? We highlights broader arguments around 'moral hyper-proximity' of producer-consumer relations, and the strategies of state and market actors to circulate 'civilized' visions for systemic and future governance over commodity landscapes. State and market calls for 'law and order,' however, obscure the structural inequities faced by smallholders in their 'everyday' production of commodities under periodic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we understand the relations between economic things and different forms of exchange – commodities, assets, gifts and singularities – in the contemporary economy? The decline of industrial capitalism and the emergence of new types of intangible valuables challenge our understanding of what economic life is about. Analysing economies through one dominant form of exchange risks overlooking the interplay between different types of valuables, their materiality and interactions that form the basis of value creation and exchange. In contrast, this special issue highlights the mutability of things – their capacity to take on and abandon different forms – as a precondition for economic activity. Drawing on a variety of empirical case studies of markets for seeds, grains, fish, carbon emissions and cattle, the contributions set out to trace the social biographies of economic things in, between and beyond multiple economic forms. We argue that it is the very ability of economic things to shift in and out of particular forms of exchange that enables the complex globalised economies of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What links the value and exchange of everyday commodities with the production of new wealth in contemporary capitalism? By taking the reader on an ethnographic stroll through a potlatch-like community festival sponsored by the Icelandic fishing industry, this article sheds light on a new liberal politics of value that is rooted in the redirection of societal wealth through the privatisation of access rights to former common pool resources. While this politics of value has created a new, highly valuable asset class by neatly separating the right to fish from the fish in the sea, it has caused moral outrage and controversy over the ownership of the nation's most valuable export commodity. To reunite what has been divided, asset-rich companies return the gifts of nature by handing out generous donations of free fish, while valuable fishing rights remain the de facto inalienable assets of societal influence and intangible wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence points to global warming and climate change as the biggest issues of the century; thus, the analysis of the weather-commodity futures prices relationship has crucial importance. This paper considers the relationship between weather anomalies, proxied by the Global Historical Surface Temperature Anomalies (HadCRUT4), and futures prices of agricultural products, energy commodities, industrial, and precious metals. Analyzing the monthly data between December 1982 and November 2020, the outcomes of the novel Granger causality test suggest unidirectional causality from the temperature anomalies to commodity futures prices. The findings imply that global temperature anomalies impact the expectations about the agricultural- and energy-related economic activities, including the use of commercial and organic fertilizers and fossil fuel combustion, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultural chemicals have been encoded as agrarian best practices. I develop the concept of agrarian racial regimes, based on the work of Cedric Robinson, to examine how constructed hierarchies of human worth are made central to the sale and usage of chemicals. A focus on the politics of pesticides in the Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the U.S. South, elucidates the ways in which agrarian racial capitalism has been reproduced through shifting antiblack conceptions of racial difference and technological progress. Two key conjunctures serve to draw these dynamics into relief: the development of the application of pesticides by aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s and the shift toward nearly complete mechanization and chemicalization of cotton production in the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing film and advertisements in this period in the context of the material relations of agriculture and race, I argue that dispossession and toxicity are encoded as best practices through antiblack representations of agrarian whiteness. In the first period, chemicals were positioned as the height of progress through racist depictions of Black workers in the fields. In the second period, in response to Black challenges to white supremacy, the notion of "clean cotton" was deployed to represent Black absence as the height of technological progress and possessive agrarian masculinity. In both instances, racial representation has served to justify unstable and toxic relations of unequal power and profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Today, commodities are exposed to ever-increasing price volatilities due to extreme market uncertainties linked with financialization. The paper addresses a timely question of whether cryptocurrencies are hedge and safe-haven for commodities. We focus on this literature gap by using individual commodities from four groups, including metal, agriculture, precious metal, and energy. Further, we also consider four major cryptocurrencies, namely, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple for our analysis. Our findings show the functional role of cryptocurrencies as hedge and safe-haven for individual commodities. Moreover, the underlying properties are persistent during the crisis period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we apply Hu and Tsay's (2014) principal component volatility (PVC) analysis to the weekly log returns of nine agricultural commodity futures from May 2005 to March 2019. The empirical results yield nine estimated PVC processes, one of which has no ARCH effects according to the statistical tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines changes in the value of Bitcoin after the BREXIT and US Presidential elections in 2016 to determine whether it and other cryptocurrencies experienced value changes associated with the vote outcomes. For comparative purposes, Bitcoin is also compared to currencies such as the Great Britain Pound, Mexican Peso and Special Drawing Rights to determine whether Bitcoin values change like currencies. Some evidence showed changes in the value of Bitcoin were weakly similar to store-of-wealth commodities like gold and silver. Overall, the election-window volatility of cryptocurrencies was much higher than the preceding one-year average for the BREXIT vote but less volatile than the one-year average for the US election vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the conditional cross effects and volatility spillover between equity markets and commodity markets (oil and gold), Fama and French HML and SMB factors, volatility index (VIX) and bonds using different multivariate GARCH specifications considering the potential asymmetry and persistence behaviours. We analyse the dynamic conditional correlation between the US equity market and a set of commodity prices and risk factors to forecast the transmission of shock to the equity market firstly, and to determine and compare the optimal hedge ratios from the different models based on the hedging effectiveness of each model. Our findings suggest that all models confirm the significant returns and volatility spillovers. More importantly, we find that GO-GARCH is the best-fit model for modelling the joint dynamics of different financial variables. The results of the current study have implications for investors: (i) the equity market displays inverted dynamics with the volatility index suggesting strong evidence of diversification benefit; (ii) of the hedging assets gold appears the best hedge for the US equity market as it has a higher hedge effectiveness than oil and bonds over time; and (iii) despite these important results, a better hedge may be obtained by using well-selected firm sized and profitability-based portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses musical and artistic examples to raise questions about Marx's conception of the nature of use value. I uncover some respects in which concrete use values can be economically consequential in ways that go beyond simply constituting an abstract precondition (as the basis of demand) for the saleability of commodities. The categories of 'production-tracking' and 'really unsubsumable' use values are described and analyzed, also with the aid of considerations drawn from the realms of music and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government's 2008 fiscal stimulus resulted in a surge of liquidity flowing into the country's shadow banking system. The paper focuses on two financing channels: the Fanya Metal Exchange and the commodity collateral financing market, which are paradigmatic for the unintended consequences of this credit bubble. The opacity of these markets and the assumption that asset prices would rise indefinitely incentivized widespread fraud that eventually impacted global metals markets and roiled China's economy. These two cases elucidate the complexity of China's financialized commodity markets, the spatially variegated consequences of credit bubbles and the fragile foundations of China's post-2008 growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agricultural commodity industry needs to focus more on profits, less on value, and must change with the consumer. In short, a branded approach is needed. Households today are comprised of time-starved persons working outside of the home who have less experience shopping for and distinguishing between ready-to-eat fruits and vegetables and ones that may be overripe. Consumers want to place their trust in branded companies to give an official endorsement that the product is indeed good and worthy of purchase (e.g., Dole Brands, Sun-Maid Raisins). This change in the mindset of today's food shopper has provided an unprecedented opportunity for marketers of commodities to begin to act like branded companies by stamping the name of a well- known brand onto a commodity thereby guaranteeing its goodness and freshness. A profitable opportunity exists on the horizon for commodity marketers to behave in a manner that is more consistent with branded companies and today's consumer. A case history of Ocean Spray, which has recently faced a decision to protect the brand or sell off and take the risk of being a non-branded commodity in an extremely competitive market, is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'small commodity city' of Yiwu in China specialises in low-end products, enjoying economic success due to its early establishment of private enterprise, yet relying upon traditional forms of solidarity as well as those provided by the structures of the market. It has 'history', but one that has been reconstructed beyond all recognition. Drawing primarily upon the work of Doreen Massey, this article explores the burgeoning sense of place in Yiwu and the wider implications this has for thinking on place. The article analyses two specific elements: the 'Wenzhou model', on which China's small commodity economy is built, and the architectural form of the 'small district'. It argues that the use of the Wenzhou model in Yiwu situates it at the forefront of an economic national historical trajectory, and that the development of small districts, tied as they are to previous historical built forms, provides a sense of the past as an assemblage from which current identity can be forged. A sense of place, it proposes, has arisen precisely due to the unusual assemblage of those elements, but is less tied to traditional notions of place, being more grounded within moments and networks that resonate with current post-revolutionary lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tea production comprises concerted acts of discernment—from plucking and processing tealeaves, to tasting, blending, and valuing tea—the outcome of which ranges from the ordinary to the singular. Tracing the tension between the two, this article cast a closer look at how aesthetic judgments are made and shared, and the ways in which they are incorporated into the production of mass market commodities. The aim of this paper is to highlight the nuanced practices of aesthetic judgment, which, no matter how indispensable to the production of an ostensibly ordinary good, are obscured by the widespread association of taste with distinguished consumption—the conflation, in other words, of aesthetic judgment with "good taste." Based on ethnographic research conducted with producers and professional tea-tasters across the Ceylon Tea industry, it argues for a broader understanding of the judgment of taste as an enactment of sensory labor irreducible to commonly held categories of distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether Bitcoin acts as a diversifier, hedge or safe haven tool for investors in major developed and developing markets, as well as for commodities. This paper employs the GARCH Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model. The sample covers seven developed and six developing countries, five regional indices and 10 commodity series. The results show that Bitcoin acts as a hedge for investors in most of the developing countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and South Korea, but only as a diversifier for investors in developed countries and for commodities. Moreover, Bitcoin acts as a diversifier for all the 10 commodities studied here. During the US election in 2016, Brexit referendum in 2016, and the burst of Chinese market bubble in 2015, Bitcoin acted as a safe haven asset for both the US and non-US investors. Understanding the role of Bitcoin is important for financial market participants who seek protection against market turmoil and downward movements. Furthermore, our findings would be of interests to regulators and governments to engage in more discussion of the role of Bitcoin in financial markets. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the usefulness of Bitcoin for investments. Furthermore, it distinguishes the benefits of Bitcoin as a diversifier, hedge and safe haven to investors in the developed versus developing markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the workings of a contemporary second-hand thrift store in California. The ethnographic notes collected during six-months fieldwork and subsequent returns present accounts of the practices, values and people involved in turning the remainders of consumption into cultural commodities, and the interwoven relations between object and people. The process of transformation is best understood in a nexus between gift and market exchange as an act of categorisation. Revisiting Mary Douglas' statement on dirt as matter of classification, the article shows how value is momentarily fixed in the objects to allow them to re-enter second-hand economies, and how categorisation is an attempt to manage the reality of disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Comedy of Errors is uniquely occupied with both money and magic. Yet, while the play delivers on its monetary conceit nothing remotely magical takes place in Ephesus. This article attempts to resolve this contradiction by suggesting that the form of magic particular to the play is money. Attending to the confusion of the Antipholi not only as twins, but also in the act of economic exchange, this confusion becomes legible as a breakdown of the process of circulation. With the aid of Marx, who received his own help theorising money from Shakespeare, this impasse will reveal the magical nature of money, and explain the play’s transposal of qualities of the monetary onto the magical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using six prominent metal commodities, we provide evidence on the out-of-sample forecasting of stock returns for the market indices of the G7 countries, for which there is little prior evidence in this context. We find precious metals (gold and silver) can improve forecast accuracy relative to the benchmark and performs well compared to forecast combinations. From an economic gains perspective, forecasting returns provides certainty equivalent gains in a market timing strategy for the G7 countries. These certainty equivalent gains are large enough to make active portfolio management attractive, even for individual investors. Gains remain after considering reasonable transaction costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We de-compose the S&P Goldman Sachs Commodity Index into its underlying commodity subcategories and develop a modified conditional value at risk (CVaR) metric to examine downside risk linked to economic periods which are classified by their GDP growth as green, yellow, orange and red. We term this new metric economic CVaR (ECVaR). We found significant differences in the relative ECVaR rankings of different commodities over our different economic cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting the importance of commodities for the Australian economy, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the Australian economy with a commodity sector. We assess whether its forecasts can be improved by using it as a prior for an empirical Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR). We find that the forecasts from the BVAR tend to be more accurate than those from the DSGE model. Nevertheless, for output growth these forecasts do not outperform benchmark models, such as a small open economy BVAR estimated using the standard priors for forecasting. A Bayesian factor augmented vector autoregression produces the most accurate near-term inflation forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study the relationship between Bitcoin and commodities by assessing the ability of Bitcoin to act as a diversifier, hedge, or safe haven against daily movements in commodities in general, and energy commodities in particular. We focus on energy commodities because energy, in the form of electricity, is an essential input in the Bitcoin production. For the entire period, results show that Bitcoin is a strong hedge and a safe-haven against movements in both commodity indices. We further examine whether that ability is also present for non-energy commodities and our analysis show insignificant results when energy commodities are excluded from the general commodity index. We also account for the December 2013 Bitcoin price crash and our results reveal that Bitcoin hedge and safe-haven properties against commodities and energy commodities are only present in the pre-crash period, whereas in the post-crash period Bitcoin is no more than a diversifier. In addition to uncovering the time-varying role of Bitcoin, we highlight the dissimilarity in the dynamic correlations between the extreme downward and extreme upward movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commodities are known to exhibit cyclical behaviour. This paper studies the dynamics of commodities regimes and their implications for portfolio diversification. Using an extension of the regime-switching model, we find that the 12 commodities studied can be clustered into four groups with different regime dynamics, demonstrating that the asset class behaviour of commodities is far from homogeneous. The existence of two regimes is transversal to the assets studied. One regime is marked by high volatility and the other by low volatility. In both regimes, most of the commodities exhibit returns that are not statistically significantly different from those of the stock market regime. The exceptions are oil and natural gas during the low-volatility regime. The analysis of regime synchronization shows that our stock market proxy has low synchronization with commodities, which suggests potential diversification value from adding commodities to an equity portfolio. Based on portfolio optimization, we find that commodities are included in the optimal portfolios in the bull and bear regime of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. The benefits of diversifying into commodities are particularly strong in the bear stock market regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional change and deregulation laid the groundwork forfinancializationof the U.S. commodity futures markets. Financial innovations allowed investors, through Wall Street banks, to circumvent position limit regulations so that financial traders now dominate futures markets and the price discovery process. As an asset class, prices of commodities now behave like the price of any asset: They are more volatile and subject to periodic bubbles. Financialization of commodity markets suggests the possibility of a more direct transmission mechanism from monetary policy to measured inflation. The Federal Reserve’s policy ofQuantitative Easingannounced in November 2010 provides an operative example of this mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines stock market integration for commodity-dependent African countries. The analysis is carried out in two phases – first we adjust the respective national equity returns for changes in commodity prices and examine integration in the context of commodity-adjusted stock returns, and second we focus on integration associated with changes in commodity prices in a novel modelling framework. The results for this unexamined area of research are interesting: (a) African stock markets are not driven by more than one common component and (b) commodity-adjusted integration is significantly lower than nonadjusted integration. We discuss the implications of the results for index construction, modelling and diversification in the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the global social–economic impact of shale gas extraction, comparing the differing social and economic impacts shale gas extraction may have on communities in developed and developing countries. It argues that the benefits of fracking are more likely to be enjoyed by communities in highly and very highly developed countries rather than by those in countries with low or medium levels of development . Additionally, it shows that the potential risks and drawbacks of shale gas and its extraction are more likely to be experienced by communities in these latter countries than by those in highly or very highly developed countries. However, it also demonstrates that even communities in developed countries are vulnerable to environmental and health risks associated with shale gas extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the popular Schwartz 97 two-factor approach, we study future contracts written on fresh farmed salmon, which have been actively traded at the Fish Pool Market in Norway since 2006. This approach features a stochastic convenience yield for the salmon spot price. We connect this approach with the classical literature on fish-farming and aquaculture using first principles, starting by modelling the aggregate salmon farming production process and modelling the demand using a Cobb–Douglas utility function for a representative consumer. The model is estimated by means of Kalman filtering, using a rich data-set of contracts with different maturities traded at Fish Pool between 12 June 2006 and 22 June 2012. The results are then discussed in the context of other commodity markets, specifically for live cattle which acts as a substitute. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, a Krill-Herd Support Vector Regression (KH-vSVR) model is introduced. The Krill Herd (KH) algorithm is a novel metaheuristic optimization technique inspired by the behaviour of krill herds. The KH optimizes the SVR parameters by balancing the search between local and global optima. The proposed model is applied to the task of forecasting and trading three commodity exchange traded funds on a daily basis over the period 2012–2014. The inputs of the KH-vSVR models are selected through the model confidence set from a large pool of linear predictors. The KH-vSVR’s statistical and trading performance is benchmarked against traditionally adjusted SVR structures and the best linear predictor. In addition to a simple strategy, a time-varying leverage trading strategy is applied based on heterogeneous autoregressive volatility estimations. It is shown that the KH-vSVR outperforms its counterparts in terms of statistical accuracy and trading efficiency, while the leverage strategy is found to be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the transmission from equity markets to commodity markets during two major financial crises, namely the Subprime Mortgage and the Sovereign Debt Crises. We perform an analysis on sub-stages from 3 January 2003 to 31 October 2013 to capture the price behaviour of both equity and commodity markets. Two financial crises indicators, VIX and CDS, are used to represent fear of a crisis. We find that correlations between commodity and equity markets are time-varying and highly volatile during a financial crisis. While sharing some common features, commodities cannot be considered a homogeneous asset class. Segmentation characteristics of commodity markets disappear in times of financial crises, reducing their substitutability as an investment portfolio for asset diversification purposes. Through our test for Granger causality, we find the existence of transmission during a financial crisis. Volatility spillover effect also plays a major role as transmission mechanisms. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodities decoupled from the VIX rather soon, and there is an increase in correlation with the CDS. In addition, we find the decoupling effect of most commodities show insignificant correlations with the Dow Jones, VIX and CDS after the Greek debt restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a number of scholars have sought to lift Walter Benjamin's urban writing out of its original European context and to appropriate it for studies of postcolonial cities and cultures, few have attempted to situate Benjamin's original analyses of urban consumer culture within the wider context of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. Yet Benjamin's montage of the Parisian capital in the Arcades Project captures a key moment in the integration of metropolitan consumer publics into new global markets, and, with its plethora of exotic commodities, imperial spectacles and world fairs, records popular imaginative constructions of the colonies as spaces of leisure, luxury and abundance. This essay suggests that, in linking these images to the abstract and mysterious properties of the commodity form, and in underscoring the forms of abstraction at work in the ‘dreamworlds’ of metropolitan consumer culture, Benjamin's work can be seen to expose a colonial politics of the visible at the heart of nineteenth-century metropolitan consciousness. His theoretical interventions, moreover, give shape to an alternative mode of reading the metropolis – one that brings traces of the uneven histories and structural legacies of colonial exchange into the field of vision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In theTrading Consequencesproject, historians, computational linguists, and computer scientists collaborated to develop a text mining system that extracts information from a vast amount of digitized published English-language sources from the “long nineteenth century” (1789 to 1914). The project focused on identifying relationships within the texts between commodities, geographical locations, and dates. The authors explain the methodology, uses, and the limitations of applying digital humanities techniques to historical research, and they argue that interdisciplinary approaches are critically important in addressing the technical challenges that arise. Collaborative teamwork of the kind described here has considerable potential to produce further advances in the large-scale analysis of historical documents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides an overview of the unfolding of the financialization of commodities in the 2000–2014 time frame. Different phases are described according to the positioning of the group of traders, their motivations, and the type of financial assets used to take a position in commodities. The main theme is the failure of arbitrage to level prices of similar financial assets traded in different markets. However, this failure does not depend on financing constraints suffered by arbitrageurs. Following Mirowski (2010) it is shown that arbitrage becomes a form of financial innovation rather than an equilibrating mechanism in contemporary financial markets. Historical accidents and changes in policy affect the positions of groups in the financial market game. The various strategies used are explained by creating a set of T-accounts for the various groups that highlight the winners and the losers in the various phases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper tests the efficiency and price discovery mechanism in the cocoa cash and futures markets over the period March 1981–August 2009. The results indicate that the price discovery is done in the cash market and spreads to the futures markets and that the futures price can be seen as an unbiased predictor of future cash prices. There is no sign of a risk premium in the futures price. Since the cash behaves like a random walk we cannot reject market efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay addresses the production of value while considering the artistic labor process, with a focus on the visual arts. First, the commodity form of artistic works is examined and theoretical challenges are pointed out. Second, a specific ideology of the artistic labor process is considered. This ideology serves to conceal the economic relations of production that shape artistic labor as a producer of value. Finally, an analysis of the substance of value is proposed. Intellectual property rights are examined from the perspective of value production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One reason that investors hold commodities is to receive diversification benefits. However, while an extensive set of existing studies demonstrate diversification benefits when investors hold international stocks or bonds, they are generally silent on the implications of holding commodities. Using an asset pricing framework, we investigate the benefits to investors from holding commodities, both individually and in portfolios. Generally, commodity and stock markets are integrated, although there are time-varying benefits to investors that are subject to sample period selection and investment horizon. We show that Asian investors receive positive risk adjusted returns in gold and rice markets but not in any of the other commodity markets investigated. The risk adjusted returns are time-varying: during the Asian financial crisis risk adjusted returns were negative – a penalty for investing in commodities – whereas during the global financial crisis the reverse was true and investors earned positive excess returns. The time-varying nature of the benefits that arise from diversification in commodities and their breakdown during periods of crisis, highlight the problems that investors may face when using commodities for long-term investment in addition to traditional holdings of stocks and bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between finance, financial institutions and human rights in an increasingly financialised world. Though developments have been made in human rights with respect to business, particularly with the United Nations' endorsement of UN Special Representative John Ruggie'sGuiding Principles in Business and Human Rights, there remains a dearth of research into the ways that, specifically, the financial industry maligns human rights worldwide. This article bolsters discussion of the financial sector, human rights and the government and explores how these organisations, specifically in the United Kingdom and United States context, exploit the defuse nature of their operations and the lax government regulations on the financial industry to ensure the continuing prosperity of the financial and business world to the detriment of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]