Hedging spot fuel oil in Singapore: Will the new SIMEX contract succeed?

We assess SIMEX's new market for fuel oil futures by examining its effectiveness in hedging a cash fuel oil position in Singapore. We find that the SIMEX contract can eliminate about two-thirds of the volatility of a Singapore cash position and is many times more effective than a cross-hedge constructed with overseas contracts. Given its potential usefulness as a hedging tool for the regional petroleum industry, we anticipate that the new contract will be a success.We are grateful to Mobil (New York) for making the Platt oil price data available to us and to Jim Bovenage specifically for accessing the data for us.     

Church, Economy and State

Through their pulpits in churches and broadcasting British clerics have misused their spiritual influence to support or advocate economic policies they are not equipped to judge. A clergyman who does not share the clerical consensus outlines a dissenting view.     

Skin color shades in advertising to ethnic audiences: The case of African Americans

Two experimental studies were conducted to examine African Americans' (AA) perceptions and attitudes toward light-skinned and dark-skinned AA female models in print advertisements. Using convenience student samples from three universities in the southeastern USA, the first study examined the perceptions and attitudes of 299 AA males toward the advertising stimuli, while the second study explored the perceptions and attitudes of 251 AA females to the same stimuli. In Study 1, consistent with marketplace, evolutionary and reinforcement theories, AA males evaluated light-skinned AA female models higher on physical attractiveness and more favorably on ad- and brand-based evaluations than dark-skinned AA female models. The exploratory results of Study 2 found that AA females evaluated dark-skinned AA female models higher on physical attractiveness than light-skinned AA female models, but no significant differences on ad- and brand-based evaluations were reported. The authors discuss the findings, limitations and directions for future research.     

Rethinking strategy and geopolitics: Critical responses to globalisation

Rethinking geopolitics is a key feature of those disciplines concerned with rearticulating the site and nature of political space and political community in an age of globalisation causing much social protest and concern. The article focuses upon how social movements challenging globalisation are rearticulating and rethinking, through their objectives and strategies, the practices, meaning and site of state sovereignty and ‘the (geo)political’. The article focuses upon the way critical movements such as the Emiliano Zapata (Zapatista) Army of National Liberation (EZLN) are engaging with new ways of thinking about, representing and constructing political space and the relationship between the local and the global whilst cultivating an inclusionary national community project(s). The article argues that the EZLN engages in a struggle which may provide an insight into the possibility of cultivating alternative and genuinely democratic civil societies and inclusive political communities that transcend the exclusionary cartography and institutions of the neoliberal state.     

Australian Government COVID-19 Business Supports

This article documents the considerable economic support provided to businesses by the Australian Government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that measures were associated with higher levels of business profitability and savings, a strong recovery in payroll jobs and wages, and mixed effects with respect to business dynamism. We formally evaluate the SME Cashflow Boost, finding costs per job-year saved in the vicinity of $72–83,000 ($US51–59,000) over its first year, implying between 400 and 500,000 job-years saved over this period. Combined with results from previous studies, this suggests between 1.1 and 1.3 million job-years were saved by the SME Cashflow Boost and JobKeeper Payment over their respective first years post-announcement.     

Emerging market multinational corporations' cross-border mergers and acquisitions and political distance: Does corporate political activity matter?

Due to rising anti-globalization sentiment, emerging market multinational corporations (EMNCs) face additional challenges in conducting cross-border mergers and acquisitions, particularly in the developed markets. Built on institutional theory, we specifically examine how political distance, representing host–home country differences in various attributes in the political environment, influences the speed of approval for EMNC acquisition in the United States. The findings suggest that a larger political distance between the United States and EMNCs home country reflects challenges for EMNCs to gain legitimacy in the United States, resulting in the longer time required for acquisition approval. The EMNCs' corporate political activity moderated this relationship in that more corporate political activity improves the legitimacy perception of EMNCs among political actors, decreasing the time required for acquisition approval.     

Population density,urbanisation and agricultural mechanisation in modern Ghana

Farmers' technological choices take place within farming systems that are shaped by population pressure, connectivity to urban markets and agro-ecological conditions. The relationship between these drivers and agricultural technology use is ambiguous. On the one hand, population growth can increase the supply of labour, driving down wage rates and reducing the incentives for mechanisation. On the other hand, rural–urban movements of people can reduce rural labour supply while simultaneously driving up the demand for food and hence the demand for mechanisation. Past theories of agricultural mechanisation have explained the low adoption of agricultural machinery in land-abundant cereal production systems of SSA in terms of these drivers. However, recent empirical observations find extensive adoption of mechanised ploughing technology by small, medium and large-scale farmers in Ghana. Examining the Ghanaian experience can thus shed new light on theories of mechanisation. A large household survey dataset covering eight districts is combined with geo-spatial data on population, urban proximity and agro-ecological factors to consider whether the existing theories are able to explain farm-level adoption decisions in this context. The analysis finds that a farmer's decision to use agricultural machinery is associated with lower population density and proximity to urban centres. In northern Ghana, these drivers of technological change are as important as farm household characteristics in understanding cross-sectional patterns of machinery adoption.