Compliance advisory service feasibility study

This report identifies areas or methods of regulatory compliance information and advice to SMEs in the region that are inadequate or deficient. It recommends additional services that will benefit SMEs in the region taking into account the business support simplification agenda, state aid, legal liability, environmental and equality issues

Review of CCAFS Capacity Enhancement activities

CCAFS and the CGIAR research Centers provide cutting-edge research on global climate change, agriculture and food security. CCAFS also has the objective to support Capacity Enhancement (CE) through improvements to: 1. Researchers’ capacity to generate knowledge on climate-smart food systems, adaptive capacity and rural livelihoods under climate change; 2. Decision-makers’ capacity to demand, critique and use this knowledge effectively to work out policy options, and to evaluate and adjust these policy options and related actions; 3. Decision-influencers’ access to information (Climate Futures definition). CE includes the development of skills and knowledge, dissemination of information, education, empowerment and behaviour change. A particular focus is empowerment of underrepresented groups including women. These activities are undertaken across much of the developing world, defined into the regions, East Africa, West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and South Asia (and to a lesser extent the Middle East and North Africa, East Asia, Central Asia and Global). CCAFS has no specific targets for spending or performance on CE, and there is no formal reporting procedure for CE. Reported activities in 2011, 2012 and 2013 include CE outputs, and some reported outcomes and case studies also include CE. CCAFS is scheduled for an external evaluation in 2015 by CGIAR’s Independent Evaluation Arrangement (IEA). As part of the internal preparation for this evaluation, this report provides the findings of an evaluation of CCAFS Capacity Enhancement activities

Integal futures based on the paradigm approach

The study discusses the interpretation of integral futures in the context of paradigm. The dynamic matrix model of futures paradigm has been developed for carrying out meta-analysis of futures. As a result of meta-analysis integral futures and its new paradigms are defined by way of reconstructing futures paradigm history as responses to changing societal needs and through the outcomes of dynamic and comparative analysis of futures paradigms. The study sets the argument that integral futures: a) is entering a new phase in development of futures that responses to societal demands for sustainability, democratic participation and continuous knowledge production and integration, b) it is the phase of cooperation building between theoretical and practical futures, c) it is the complementary development of co-evolutionary and participatory paradigms, d) it unfolds further research perspectives for futures

Characteristics of Real Futures Trading Networks

Futures trading is the core of futures business, and it is considered as one of the typical complex systems. To investigate the complexity of futures trading, we employ the analytical method of complex networks. First, we use real trading records from the Shanghai Futures Exchange to construct futures trading networks, in which nodes are trading participants, and two nodes have a common edge if the two corresponding investors appear simultaneously in at least one trading record as a purchaser and a seller respectively. Then, we conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis on the constructed futures trading networks. Empirical results show that the futures trading networks exhibit features such as scale-free behavior with interesting odd-even-degree divergence in low-degree regions, small-world effect, hierarchical organization, power-law betweenness distribution, disassortative mixing, and shrinkage of both the average path length and the diameter as network size increases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses real data to study futures trading networks, and we argue that the research results can shed light on the nature of real futures business.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures. Final version published in Physica

A model of financialization of commodities

We analyze how institutional investors entering commodity futures markets, referred to as the financialization of commodities, affect commodity prices. Institutional investors care about their performance relative to a commodity index. We find that all commodity futures prices, volatilities, and correlations go up with financialization, but more so for index futures than for nonindex futures. The equity-commodity correlations also increase. We demonstrate how financial markets transmit shocks not only to futures prices but also to commodity spot prices and inventories. Spot prices go up with financialization, and shocks to any index commodity spill over to all storable commodity prices

Price discovery in spot and futures markets: a reconsideration

We reconsider the issue of price discovery in spot and futures markets. We use a threshold error correction model to allow for arbitrage operations to have an impact on the return dynamics. We estimate the model using quote midpoints, and we modify the model to account for time-varying transaction costs. We find that the futures market leads in the process of price discovery. The lead of the futures market is more pronounced in the presence of arbitrage signals. Thus, when the deviation between the spot and the futures market is large, the spot market tends to adjust to the futures market

Examining the Merits of Dual Regulation for Single-Stock Futures: How the Divergent Insider Trading Regimes for Federal Futures and Securities Markets Demonstrate the Necessity for (and Virtual Inevitability of) Dual CFTCSEC Regulation for Single-Stock Futures

[Excerpt] Single-stock futures are a recent addition to the financial landscape in the United States and provide retail and institutional investors with a new tool for investment or speculation. So far, the market response to these instruments has been cool. Some observers have argued that the regulatory framework for single-stock futures is a cause of the lack of investor interest. Single-stock futures are regulated by both the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and this system of dual regulation has been criticized as overly burdensome and unnecessary

Implication of two new paradigms for futures studies

The paper considers the emergence of two recent perspectives in futures work. One is evolutionary futures studies. The other is critical futures studies. After describing aspects of each, the paper considers them as alternative rival paradigms in relation to criteria that include: the role of the human being as a subject, the role of interpretation and differences in methodological premises. It concludes that both have contributed to the development of futures methods but that a number of theoretical and methodological problems still remain unsolved

A Challenging Conversation on Integral Futures: Embodied Foresight and Trialogues

Practitioner reflection is vital for knowledge frameworks such as Ken Wilber's Integral perspective. Richard Slaughter, Joseph Voros and others have combined Wilber's perspective and Futures Studies to create Integral Futures as a new stance. This paper develops Embodied Foresight as a new approach about the development of new Integral Futures methodologies (or meta-methodologies) and practitioners, with a heightened sensitivity to ethics and specific, local contexts. Three practitioners conduct a 'trialogue' - a three-way deep dialogue - to discuss issues of theory generation, practitioner development, meta-methodologies, institutional limits, knowledge systems, and archetypal pathologies. Personal experiences within the Futures Studies and Integral communities, and in other initiatory and wisdom traditions are explored