Connecting the Dots: Linking Sustainable Wild Capture Fisheries Initiatives and Impact Investors

Wilderness Markets undertook a series of fishery value chain assessments to better understand the opportunities and constraints for private impact capital to flow into wild capture fisheries markets. Given the investments in developing sustainable fisheries pilots, Wilderness Markets expected to identify a range of investment opportunities in each of the fisheries assessed. However, they did not find investment opportunities that could address the suite of challenges associated with improving financial and social outcomes, while also contributing to conservation outcomes, particularly in developing country fisheries. Wilderness Markets' research indicates the lack of triple-bottom line (TBL) investment opportunities is due to six main constraints to an economically sustainable fisheries value chain—data, management, market differentiation, infrastructure, finance and the lack of investable entities

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

Analisis Efisiensi Rantai Pasokan dan Nilai Tambah Produk Olahan Lele di KUB Karmina, Desa Tegalrejo, Kecamatan Sawit, Kabupaten Boyolali

Kampung Lele is the name for Tegalrejo Village because most of the population work as cultivator of catfish. Abundant catfish raw materials and people who are getting bored with processed catfish are usually only served with fried or baked, formed a catfish processing agroindustry that is KUB Karmina. The purpose of this research is to determine efficient supply chain, to know the flow of product, information flow, and the flow of supply chain finance, to calculate product efficiency, to calculate the added value of each member of supply chain network. The research method adopted the marketing efficiency approach, the DEAP 2.1 software and the Hayami method. Selected supply chain models start from catfish farmers, Karmina Kubina, and consumers. From several products in KUB Karmina, products that have relatively efficient value of 1,000 abon and chips of meat, while the relatively inefficient products of flaky chips and meat chips with an efficiency value below 1,000. Chains that exist in the first chain model of catfish farmers and KUB Karmina with abon products, meat chips, flaky chips, and skin chips. The breeder of catfish produces added value of Rp 4,334,64. Value added abon Rp 49.714, meat chips Rp 23.480, leather chips Rp 15.161, fin chips Rp 22.918. KUB Karmina can increase the production of abon and meat chips because it has a high level of efficiency and great added value in order to get the maximum profit. Keywords: Hayami Method, DEAP 2.1, Marketing Efficiency, Value Added, Supply Chai

Credit risk management in financing agriculture

A griculture is an inherently risky economic activity. A large array of uncontrollable elements can affect output production and prices, resulting in highly variable economic returns to farm households. In developing countries, farmers also lack access to both modern instruments of risk management—such as agricultural insurance, futures contracts, or guarantee funds—and ex post emergency government assistance. Such farmers rely on different “traditional” coping strategies and risk-mitigation techniques, but most of these are inefficient. Formal and semiformal arrangements—such as contract farming, joint-liability lending, and value-chain integration—have arisen in recent decades, but they too are limited and can be very context sensitive. One consequence of inadequate overall financial risk management is that farmers in general face constrained access to formal finance. The smaller the net worth of the farm household, the worse the degree of exclusion. Formal lenders avoid financing agriculture for a host of reasons: high cost of service delivery, information asymmetries, lack of branch networks, perceptions of low profitability in agriculture, lack of collateral, high levels of rural poverty, or low levels of farmer education and financial literacy. But, predominantly, bank managers around the world say they will not finance agriculture because of the high degree of uncontrolled production and price risk that confronts the sector. A farmer can be an able and diligent manager with an excellent reputation for repayment, guaranteed access to a market, and high-quality technical assistance, but an unexpected drought or flood can force him or her to involuntarily default. In emerging countries with fair to high levels of agricultural market and trade integration, large commercial farmers may escape this predicament because they have the ability to purchase insurance, engage in price hedging, obtain financing overseas, or liquidate assets quickly in the event of a default. Consequently, formal lenders tend to overemphasize the use of immoveable collateral as the primary buffer against default risk, which means they provide services to a limited segment of the farm population. Small- and medium-sized farmers, who constitute the vast majority of farm operators, often do not have secured-title land, which is the preferred type of collateral; if they do, its value may be insufficient to cover the loan in question. Even if farmers have sufficient titled land to collateralize loans, they may refuse low-interest formal loans and assume high-interest informal ones that have no collateral requirements instead. They may also use savings to finance agricultural production because they are averse to risking their most prized possession—land. The result is limited supply or access to formal agricultural financing, even though much of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia is rural and depends on agriculture and livestock rearing for their main livelihood activities.agricultural finance, agriculture finance, Risk management, Rural finance,

Zap Q-Learning for Optimal Stopping Time Problems

The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact subset of $\mathbb{R}^n$. We build on the dynamic programming approach taken by Tsitsikilis and Van Roy, wherein they propose a Q-learning algorithm to estimate the optimal state-action value function, which then defines an optimal stopping rule. We provide insights as to why the convergence rate of this algorithm can be slow, and propose a fast-converging alternative, the "Zap-Q-learning" algorithm, designed to achieve optimal rate of convergence. For the first time, we prove the convergence of the Zap-Q-learning algorithm under the assumption of linear function approximation setting. We use ODE analysis for the proof, and the optimal asymptotic variance property of the algorithm is reflected via fast convergence in a finance example

Linking African smallholders to high-value markets : practitioner perspectives on benefits, constraints, and interventions

This paper provides the results of an international survey of practitioners with experience in facilitating the participation of African smallholder farmers in supply chains for higher-value and/or differentiated agricultural products. It explores their perceptions about the constraints inhibiting and the impacts associated with this supply chain participation. It also examines their perceptions about the factors affecting the success of project and policy interventions in this area, about how this success is and should be measured, and about the appropriate roles for national governments, the private sector, and development assistance entities in facilitating smallholder gains in this area. The results confirm a growing'consensus'about institutional roles, yet suggest some ambiguity regarding the impacts of smallholder participation in higher-value supply chains and the appropriateness of the indicators most commonly used to gauge such impacts. The results also suggest a need to strengthen knowledge about both the'old'and'new'sets of constraints (and solutions) related to remunerative smallholder inclusion, in the form of the rising role of standards alongside more long-standing concerns about infrastructure and logistical links to markets.Access to Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems

The intellectual capital - environmental practices, performance and their relationships in the Romanian banking sector

Purpose – This paper reviews the knowledge assets that can be capitalized for successful Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) implementation in the Romanian banking industry. GSCM is defined as the company’s ability to understand and manage the environmental risks along the Supply Chain (SC) (Carter and Rogers,2008). Banks are very much members of the SCs (McKenzie and Wolfe, 2004), called to integrate the environmental management into both operational and core commercial activities and to manage the environmental risk in their supply chain (FORGE Group,2000; International Finance Corporation, 2006; UNEP Finance Initiative, 2009a). Intellectual capital, or the ‘stock’ of knowledge-based equity firms hold, is recognized as a key contributor to their competitiveness (Bontis et al., 1999), which may act as a driver of environmental pro-activeness (Bernauer et al., 2006; Wu et al., 2007), as well as an obstacle in the process to design and implement GSCM (Post and Altman, 1994; Baresel-Bofinger et al., 2007), while organizational learning is seen as the key component in overcoming the organizational obstacles to environmental changes (Post and Altman, 1992; Post and Altman, 1994; Anderson and Wolff, 1996). Design/methodology/approach – This research paper describes the empirical results of a cross-sectional design employed in a sample of 41 banks operating in Romania with the purpose a. to explore the stage of designing and implementing GSCM practices in the Romanian banking sector; b. to determine which GSCM practices tend to be followed the most, c. which are the bank managers’ perceived benefits from implementing GSCM practices, as well as perceived obstacles in GSCM implementation in the banking sector; and d. what is the relationship between the aforementioned variables. For these purposes several statistical analyses were used, including both descriptive and inferential statistics. Originality/value – This is the first study looking for GSCM issues in the Romanian banking industry. The results of this research provide insights into what extent knowledge assets could be capitalized for successful Green Supply Chain Management implementation in the Romanian banking industry. Furthermore, it is increasing the ecological awareness, the theoretical and managerial insights for an effective implementation of GSCM practices in the banking sector. The analysis reveals that GSCM practices (especially practices in the immaterial flow) are strongly and significantly correlated with perceived benefits and pressures. However,this should be addressed in future research because the present study offers only correlational data and cannot establish causation. The study also concludes that bank’s size and foreign/Romanian ownership do not influence at all the level of GSCM practices implementation and related perceptions (pressures, obstacles,benefits) in the Romanian banking sector. Practical implications – The findings of this paper point to the conclusion that the banking sector in Romania is at a somehow advanced stage of ecological adaptation in the physical flow and at an early stage in the immaterial and commercial flows. Based on the literature and study’s findings, regarding the role that the management of intellectual capital and knowledge flow plays, several recommendations are proposed for enhancing the implementation process of GSCM practices in the banking industry in Romania

Discretization of highly persistent correlated AR(1) shocks

The finite state Markov-Chain approximation method developed by Tauchen (1986) and Tauchen and Hussey (1991) is widely used in economics, finance and econometrics in solving for functional equations where state variables follow an autoregressive process. For highly persistent processes, the method requires a large number of discrete values for the state variables to produce close approximations which leads to an undesirable reduction in computational speed, especially in a multidimensional case. This paper proposes an alternative method of discretizing vector autoregressions. This method can be treated as an extension of Rouwenhorst's (1995) method which, according to our experiments, outperforms the existing methods in the scalar case for highly persistent processes. The new method works well as an approximation that is much more robust to the number of discrete values for a wide range of the parameter space.Finite State Markov-Chain Approximation; Discretization of Multivariate Autoregressive Processes; Transition Matrix; Numerical Methods; Value Function Iteration; the Rouwenhorst method; VAR