Volatility in Oilseeds and Vegetable Oils Markets: Drivers and Spillovers

Food price volatility has re‐emerged as an important topic of political discussion since the food price crisis of 2007–2008. Different volatility drivers have been identified for different markets in the theoretical and empirical literature. However, there is no comprehensive analysis that considers a large number of potential drivers and investigates their joint effects in a dynamic model of interrelated markets. Our study provides such a volatility analysis for the oilseeds and vegetable oils markets. We use a common GARCH approach and a VAR model to identify volatility drivers and spillover effects. Our results show that exchange rate volatility is very important. However, the hotly debated financialisation of commodity markets is not found to be volatility increasing in our monthly data. Impulse response functions show strong spillover effects. Because many volatility drivers found to be important in other markets have no significant effect in our study, our results suggest that volatility drivers are market specific. This implies that any volatility‐reducing policies need to be designed for the market in question.     

Changing Food Consumption of Households in Developing Countries: A Bangladesh Case

Increasing incomes, urbanization, and population growth are transforming developing countries. This structural transformation is changing lifestyles and consequently food consumption and agri-food systems. The present study uses Bangladesh as a case study, a rapidly growing developing economy in South Asia to examine the changing food consumption pattern. Using information from more than 29,000 households, the present study demonstrates that, with the increase in income and urbanization, this traditional rice-consuming country is increasingly consuming more wheat. The changes in the relative consumption in Bangladesh are prominent both in rural and urban areas. The literature often is based on the premise that with increasing income, households switch from staple cereals to high food-value items. The present study highlights the need to also consider within-staple substitution.     

Agricultural mechanization and reduced tillage: antagonism or synergy?

This paper reviews agricultural mechanization and reduced tillage use in the context of sustainable intensification in developing country agriculture. The scoping review includes selected and contrasting cases – including Zimbabwe (manual systems), Bangladesh (2-wheel – single axle tractor systems), India (4-wheel – i.e. 2 axles tractor systems), Kazakhstan (mechanized systems) and Brazil (diverse systems). The expansion of reduced tillage appears strongly associated with the level of agricultural mechanization – facilitated by a number of common drivers and contextualized by the prevailing farm power and intensity of tillage. Soil conservation, timely planting and farm power savings in crop establishment are important drivers for the expansion of reduced tillage across the world, facilitated by conducive markets, institutional and policy environments and the integration of diverse actors to introduce, adapt and promote the necessary components.     

Vorschau 6 / 2010

Vorschau

Vorschau 6 / 2010     

Integration of management systems: A methodology for operational excellence and strategic flexibility

Organisations employ various management systems (MSs) to systematically address the needs of their stakeholders. As the number of MSs is mushrooming, the need has arisen to integrate them into one holistic business management system that addresses various stakeholder requirements in an integrated manner. However, the dynamics of the integration process are not yet fully understood and research has yet to establish how the integration of MSs gives rise to various types of organisational improvements. This paper focuses on how the integration process unfolds in practice to give rise to a number of socio-technical changes essential to the integration of MSs. This research is based on four cases; it reveals that integration streamlines operational processes through a number of structural, functional, and operational changes. Integration reforms bureaucratic structures, further giving rise to operational excellence and strategic flexibility. The research also provides the extension of lean production practices bundles, and an operationalisation of Adler’s concept of enabling bureaucracy.     

Do Retail Investors Follow Insider Trades?

On the basis of transaction records of retail investors provided by a large financial institution, this article analyzes whether, in the aggregate, retail investors do copy insider trades. The results suggest that insider trades are indeed an important piece of information for the transactions of retail investors, whose buy–sell imbalances (BSIs) increase in stocks which insiders buy, and whose BSIs decrease following insider sales. These results are robust when considering stock characteristics and general attention effects. With regard to trading insider stocks, retail investors’ preferences for growth and attention are less pronounced when compared with trades of noninsider stocks.     

Customer segmentation in retailing based on retail brand patronage patterns

In this study, we propose an alternative method for customer segmentation based on households’ retail brand portfolios. We suggest blockmodeling, a method that is rooted in social network analysis, to identify homogeneous groups of customers being characterized by similar patronage patterns. In a second step, we combine this method with psychometric analyses to examine group differences based on sociodemographic and purchasing behavior variables. To illustrate our approach, we use a sample of 500 households out of a panel data set of 36,502 German households in the fast-moving consumer goods sector. The findings of our analyses yield support for our assumption that our methodology, taking into account the relationship between households and the different retail brands they patronize, provides a broader understanding of the antecedents of households’ multiple store patronage strategies, leading eventually to a new form of customer segmentation.     

Measuring regional income disparities in LDCs

The problem of income disparities in developing countries is constantly gaining in importance. Clearly a pure growth strategy alone cannot be effective and disparities are steadily increasing. What is needed for an effective policy first of all are adequate statistics and indicators.