The New Price Makers: An investigation into the impact of financial investment on coffee price behaviour

The collapse of the international commodity agreements in the 1980s, together with the liberalisation of marketing systems in commodity exporting developing countries under structural adjustment programs have removed the role of the state in the pricing of commodities. The logic of liberalisation was to remove impediments to the efficient market discovery of commodities prices where state intervention was seen as the main culprit. Mainstream economics has also promoted the role of derivatives exchanges in efficient price discovery on physical markets in international commodity markets with globally fragmented production. By rapidly exploiting opportunities to profit from price deviations between futures and spot markets, rational and informed speculators are seen to drive any price deviations in the market quickly to the equilibrium price that reflect international supply and demand realities. Such a view, however, fails to consider the role of differentiated market participants on international exchanges in driving commodity prices, by assuming that all trading activities are efficiency enhancing irrespective of the motives behind them. There has been much media interest in the role of speculation on commodity prices, in particular food commodities, over the recent months. There has, however, been very little systematic evidence gathered on the extent to which speculative activities affect prices of exchange traded commodities.Using the example of international prices for coffee, this paper shows that increases in trading activities by non-physical market actors for the purposes of financial investment have led to a dislocation between prices on international exchanges and supply and demand realities. With increasing participation by variousinstitutional investors such as hedge and pension funds, prices have become increasingly driven by trading that arises owing to changes in the financial investment environment more generally, such as the dot-com crash of the late 1990s and the recent credit crunch

The role of international commodity exchanges in the formation andtransmission of prices and price risk along international coffee chains

The 1990s has seen a shift in policy from multilateral price stabilisation schemes towards market liberalisation and private risk management strategies in the context of income stabilisation for agro-commodity exporting low-income countries. This paper argues that such a policy has failed to consider the uneven access of market actors to hedging instruments as well as changes in the structure and relationships between derivatives and cash markets for commodities that have serious implications on the way in which prices are formed and transmitted within the commodity system

Cognitive apprenticeship : teaching the craft of reading, writing, and mathtematics

Includes bibliographical references (p. 25-27)This research was supported by the National Institute of Education under Contract no. US-NIE-C-400-81-0030 and the Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N00014-85-C-002

Financialisation and the financial and economic crisis - the case of South Africa

The Nature and Form of Financialisation in South Africa is conditioned by industrial and financial developments before 1994. This is an edited abridgement from a paper produced by the Financialisation, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development (FESSUD) project, an extensive EUfunded research programme.Over the past three decades studies on financialisation have rightly focused on the emergence of the financial sector as the new economic vortex in advanced industrial societies. Like a veritable centre of gravity, it has sucked capital investment from other sectors and re-calibrated their orbits to the point that some resemble dying stars

Financialized corporate strategies and restructuring of global supply chains

Industrial organization and Inter-firm relations within vertically disintegrated and spatially dispersed production systems emerged as a burgeoning area of research in the 1990s and 2000s across what might be broadly considered as development studies (see the article by Wouter Jacobs in this issue). Global commodity chain/global value chain approaches were initially concerned with the nature of ‘globalization’ in contemporary capitalism and the way in which developing countries have been integrated into the global economic system. These studies emphasized the need, as well as the opportunities, for developing country firms to ‘upgrade’- that is to engage in higher value-added activities associated with downstream portions of the chain - in order to reap the potential rewards of integration into the global economy. Whether or not the opportunities for upgrading and their associated benefits were overstated at the time, it will become clear in what remains of this article that benefits of upgrading, if they existed at all in the first place, have all but disappeared with shifts in corporate structure and strategies of lead firms in the U.S and Europe – those which coordinate and control supply chains and suppliers in developing countries – associated with the process of financialisation

Russian foreign trade, 1680-1780: the British contribution

This study aims to establish the development of foreign trade in the Muscovite lands, the Baltic provinces and in the areas which were newly settled in the mid eighteenth century with particular reference to the role of British merchants in these changes. This has required an analysis of the structure of trade through the 'Russian' Baltic and White Sea ports and an investigation of the changing patterns of commercial acitivity caused by fluctuations in the boundaries of their supply areas and of internal and external markets for the goods they handled. Detailed consideration has been given to the commodities handled in the import, export and re-export trades utilising data from the Sound Toll accounts together with British and Russian customs statistics. Having established a wide framework for the investigation of Russian foreign trade, detailed consideration has been given to the role of the British commercial community. In order to do so it has been necessary to reconstruct the methods used by British merchants in Russia in organising their commercial activities: this includes examining the structure of the British mercantile 'houses' in all the Russian ports, but especially in St. Petersburg; the patterns of recruitment of young men into the trade and their style of life in Russia; the network of contacts which they established among their compatriots, whether involved in commerce or other professions, with other foreign merchants and also with their aristocratic clients and their Russian counterparts involved in internal trade. Merchants in the Russia trade faced changing costs to their business for freight, insurance and customs duties and the fluctuations in these charges and their responses to them have been assessed. One of the most important aspects of their activities was the way in which they financed their trade. Decision-making in this matter was influenced by events throughout Europe as well as in Russia, for account had to be taken of the relative value in silver of the commodities which the Russia merchant handled in that country and elsewhere. Thus, during the late seventeenth century, they paid for Russian goods in specie whilst increasingly in the eighteenth century it made better economic sense to deal in imported commodities as far as the market allowed and finance the balance with trade surpluses accumulated elsewhere, thereby causing the emergence of a close co-operation between the British and Dutch communities in Russia in financing their trade, with the Dutch lending the proceeds of their import surplus to the British in return for bills of exchange on Amsterdam. The costs arising from the movement of the rate of exchange and interest rates within the financial network so formed, have been fully inves¬ tigated and their effect on the trade explored. The effects of these changes on Russia's overseas trade and the internal impact of the development of this external commercial sector to the Russian economy receives especial consideration with particular emphasis being placed on the response of the aristocracy in both their changing patterns of consumption of imported goods and in the development of their estates to provide raw materials for export or supplying Russian merchant and serf manufacturers who were at this time responding to growing overseas markets for their products

Analysing Finance and Production in the Contemporary Capitalist Era

here has been a dramatic restructuring of the global economy as the dictates of neoliberalism have reconfigured the contemporary capitalist system of accumulation which has involved a seismic shift from industrial to finance capital. There have been a number of important contributions to theorising this shift and about the empirical relationships between the ‘financial’ and the ‘real’ at the levels of the nation-state and the firm. To a far lesser extent, the impact of financialisation upon production - at the level of industrial sectors, commodities, firms or global production networks - has been the subject of empirical research. Consequently, articulation of the abstract relations between finance and industrial capital, and the concrete forms that this takes in contemporary capitalist accumulation, are under-theorised. This paper posits an approach to bridge the gap between the abstract and concrete by presenting an analytical framework for empirical research to elucidate the different ways in which financialisation has restructured production and the ways in which finance and production in the contemporary era work together in reinforcement and/or contradiction

Diabetes Mellitus and the Hmong: A Scoping Review of the Literature

Background and Purpose: Upon immigration to the US, the Hmong people transition to a more industrialized society which places them at an increased risk for diabetes. Hmong Americans are at increasing risk for developing diabetes. This article scopes research literature on the prevalence of diabetes and factors affecting diabetes care in the Hmong population. Methods: The literature was systematically scoped using four databases to search for studies examining factors that influence diabetes care in the Hmong. Results: A total of ten studies were retrieved. Key findings suggest that those living with diabetes have limited knowledge of the disease, and the Hmong possess cultural characteristics that ultimately affect diabetes care. Conclusion: This review revealed that there are limited published studies of diabetes in Hmong Americans and future research is needed to address these knowledge gaps in this population. Language, religion, and cultural beliefs are also significant factors to consider in diabetes care of the Hmong