Futures studies in India putting down roots

Since the 1970s the Indian government's Department of Science and Technology has been working to spread futures studies throughout the country's educational institutes, governmental policy-making groups, and corporations. Satish Seth has been involved in this effort from the beginning, and here reports on the progress and achievements to date.     

Alternative funding: Looking beyond the nation-state

The challenge for the UN and for all publicly funded institutions that distribute surpluses for international needs is nothing less than to devise new global mechanisms for the collection and distribution of the surplus generated in a global economy. A minimalist interpretation of when individual governments can and cannot provide public goods has exercised strong influences on perceptions as to what is appropriate at international levels and with regard to the financing of international institutions. There is a strong consensus on an important range of international social goods. Three kinds of financing alternatives should be accorded priority in policy research—charges for the use of the global commons, monetary measures, and international taxation.     

How to make India a knowledge-based society

The National Knowledge Commission set up by the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, in 2005 was, perhaps, the first of its kind. One of its three objectives is to make India a knowledge-based society. Among the important areas in the country where problems need to be addressed to achieve the above objective, three—education, knowledge empowerment of Panchayats (the lowest of the three-tier local self-government system in India), and ethical commercialization of the country's creative and cultural tradition—are briefly described in the article. Some steps that need to be taken in each area are stated. For example, in regard to education, we must decommercialize school and higher education, and set up 400,000 high schools in the country where children would receive high-quality free education for 10 years—that is, up to the age of 16. As regards the Panchayats, we need to institute a system so that they are empowered through knowledge in areas of immediate interest to them as well as knowledge that would make them truly informed citizens of the country. In regard to traditional knowledge, it needs to be ensured that the keepers and practitioners of this knowledge are compensated adequately and fairly if such knowledge is commercialized.     

Futures Trading,Spot Price Volatility and Market Efficiency: Evidence from European Real Estate Securities Futures

In 2007 futures contracts were introduced based upon the listed real estate market in Europe. Following their launch they have received increasing attention from property investors, however, few studies have considered the impact their introduction has had. This study considers two key elements. Firstly, a traditional Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, the approach of Bessembinder & Seguin (1992) and the Gray’s (1996) Markov-switching-GARCH model are used to examine the impact of futures trading on the European real estate securities market. The results show that futures trading did not destabilize the underlying listed market. Importantly, the results also reveal that the introduction of a futures market has improved the speed and quality of information flowing to the spot market. Secondly, we assess the hedging effectiveness of the contracts using two alternative strategies (naïve and Ordinary Least Squares models). The empirical results also show that the contracts are effective hedging instruments, leading to a reduction in risk of 64 %.     

证券、期货犯罪防范体系构建探析——以股指期货交易为切入点

股指期货是连接证券市场和期货市场的纽带,为证券市场提供了有效的避险工具。通过对股指期货犯罪行为的分析,笔者认为,操纵股指期货的行为必须纳入刑法规制范畴,同时还应当警惕并防范股指期货挂牌交易后因设计缺陷所产生的"新型老鼠仓"行为。并且单独罪名无法有效防止犯罪行为发生,应当建立综合性证券、期货犯罪防范体系。     

Innovation, Futures Thinking and Leadership

There are at least three strands of innovation: generating value from putting ideas into practice; creativity and inventive space; and macro-level social change. Recognizing the sources of and barriers to innovation in the public sector, this article reflects on how innovation and creativity in these senses can be nurtured and how the public sector can improve its policy and organizational processes to increase innovation.     

Reframing the nation-state: Rethinking the Australian dream from the local to the global

Movement across the borders of the nation-state has always been uneven, but over the past few decades the unfettered movement of goods and images has been defended under the ideology of freedom and openness. At the same time, the movement of people, including refugees, has become increasingly administered and restricted in the name of ‘the national interest’. This article argues that Australia has been part of this development. The Australian dream was once for all to own a quarter-acre housing block, protected from the machinations of the world. Across the turn of the 20th century into the present an invidious version of this dream has intensified, shorn of its egalitarian spirit. The nation-state itself has been made over in this image. The Australian state now acts on behalf of the nation to keep unwanted strangers out, while facilitating the open globalization of the Australian economy. In this context, older ethical pronouncements about freedom, equality openness and fairness no longer work. This article develops an alternative approach based upon a layering of ethical considerations. The new Australian dream it suggests will entail a complete renegotiation of how we are to live within and across the boundaries of identity, culture and economy.     

Art: Futures of the past

This essay makes a demand: it calls for a divorce between art and culture in order to reaffirm a future for art. It asks whether in a scenario in which political culture has surrendered to cultural politics, can art reaffirm and reconfigure itself as a site of exuberance, wonder, vitality, affect, memory and learning, and create a place of ethical and critical resistance?     

Informed Futures Trading and Price Discovery: Evidence from Taiwan Futures and Stock Markets

This article focuses on the information effects between the futures market and its spot market. Intraday data are used to investigate the lead-lag relationships between the returns and trading activity of Taiwan stock index futures and the spot returns. We focus on the transmission direction and the sources of information. Consistent with most previous studies, our results show that other than the contemporaneous relationship predicted by carry-cost theory and efficient market theory, futures returns significantly lead spot returns, which implies that informed trades may occur in the futures market. Using private transaction information, net open buy, as a proxy for futures trading activity and distinguishing different types of futures traders, we find that foreign institutional traders are the major source of informed trades because their trading has predictive power for future movements in both spot and futures prices. Traders in other categories are information laggards.     

Futures: A question of values-consciousness-choices

How important is the quality of values, worldviews, consciousness and choices in the theory and praxis of futures studies and the creation of possible futures? This paper is based on an unpublished Ph.D. Thesis (that is now accessible on the ADT database on the internet), a case study about the evolution of values, consciousness and choices in 12 Australian women's lives. It contains a summary of the impact of the Women's Liberation Movement on these women's values and consciousness, their current values and consciousness, as well as some of their hopes and concerns for the future. Many of the value priorities these women share stand in remarkable contrast to mainstream patriarchal ethics. These women's values also find themselves in uneasy relation to patriarchal worldviews, future visions and futures studies and in important ways surpass them. Based on my research, I propose questions and suggestions in regards to futures studies.     

Information, Trading Demand, and Futures Price Volatility

We examine the relation between futures price volatility and trading demand by type of trader in the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500-stock index futures market. We find that volatility covaries negatively with signed speculative demand shocks but is positively related to signed hedging demand shocks. No significant relation between volatility and demand shocks for small traders is found. Our results suggest that changes in positions of large hedgers destabilize the market, whereas changes in positions of large speculators stabilize volatility. Consistent with models with asymmetrically informed traders, we find that large speculators are likely to possess superior forecasting ability, large hedgers behave like positive feedback traders, and small traders are liquidity traders.     

Futures dossier: Toward picture-coded information systems

From the point of view of information theory, one page of detailed pictures, technical drawings or sophisticated cartoons contains several times more information than one page of printed text. Furthermore, from the point of view of logical types, a picture allows for simultaneous perception of all parts as well as a grasp of interrelations between parts. This enables the user to utilize non-sequential and contextual perceptual ability while verbal information can be processed only sequentially and part-by-part. Information coded into pictures, or pictorial letters consisting of pictorial parts is more efficient than information coded into alphabetic or phonetic letters. This article proposes picture-coded information systems.