Contract farming and everyday acts of resistance: Oil palm contract farmers in the Philippines

Contract violations are critical issues determining the success and sustainability of contract farming (CF). This paper challenges the common portrayal of the “powerful” company versus the “powerless” landowners/smallholders by using the literature on labour agency in global value chains to understand minor contract violations of contract farmers such, as side-selling, refusal to harvest, and burning/felling of oil palm trees. This paper conceptualizes these violations as acts of minor agency or everyday acts of resistance. The analysis highlights how CF has created chains of dependency, in which smallholders are integrated into the modern market economy through new relations of debt and power. In response, contract farmers attempt to influence and shape the CF relation by using these different acts of minor agency. This paper finds that acts of minor agency, in the aggregate, can have important effects on contract relations, governance, and organizational structure of the chain and has the potential to lead to broader changes in the underlying social relations of contract. It highlights how individual acts of minor agency may contribute to the development of a consciousness of collective opposition to the contract relation.     

Ramsey rule with forward/backward utility for long-term yield curves modeling

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This paper draws a parallel between the economic and financial points of view in the modeling of long-term yield curves and provides new results on asymptotic...     

The electric vehicle revolution: Critical material supply chains,trade and development

The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers development opportunities for countries that have abundant resources of cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium and manganese. Not surprisingly, developing countries have proposed ambitious plans to expand production of these raw materials. However, an observation from the resource curse literature is that strong institutions are required if they are to mitigate the risk of poorly directed, often excessively procyclical, investment, not least because of the complexity, opacity and price volatility of many raw materials utilised by global EV value chains. This paper examines the outlook for EV demand and associated raw material usage paying attention to the drivers and sensitivities required to assess and track future market transformations. These end use shifts are then placed in the context of the broader supply chain adjustments and trends shaping the demand. For resource exporters, adapting to structural change will require fiscal, regulatory, environmental and institution reforms designed to capture shifting patterns of resource wealth in a way which takes appropriate account of comparative advantages in specific value chains and mitigates adverse environmental and social consequences from their extraction and processing.