The Quest to Bring Land under Social and Political Control: Land Reform Struggles of the Past and Present in Ecuador

Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, the paper characterizes these struggles as the attempt to increase the social and political control of land in the face of mounting commodification. The movement started in the 1960s and remains evident in Ecuador today. Exploring land reform in Ecuador from this theoretical perspective provides new insight into land struggles in the country and contributes to debates over land reforms of the past and present elsewhere in the Global South.     

The Calculation of returns to research in distorted markets: Comment

In a recent article, Oehmke reported that a high internal rate of return for investment in research when the interaction between research and price policy costs was disregarded could become very low or even negative when the effects of research on the costs of price policy were considered. In this paper, the social returns from research in the presence of the price policies considered by Oehmke are reexamined using a simple geometric approach. The analysis suggests that an output subsidy in a small importing economy, an output subsidy in a closed economy, and a target price in a large exporting economy will on Oehmke's assumptions - cause only small reductions in the internal rate of return from investment in research. This implies that the apparent underinvestment by governments in agricultural research cannot be explained away by a large upward bias, known to governments, in measured rates of return due to failure to account for interactions between research and the costs of price policy measures.     

Dynamic multiproduct optimal hedging in the soybean complex – do time-varying correlations provide hedging improvements?

Optimal multiproduct time-varying hedge ratios are determined – for a soybean complex – and their risk-mitigating impact is contrasted over single-commodity time-varying and naive hedge ratios. A parsimonious regime-switching dynamic correlation model is employed, with the estimated dynamic correlation matrix among prices varying between two different levels, and the time-varying correlations being applied to the multiproduct setting. Findings obtained are three-fold. First, there is significant evidence that estimated simultaneous correlations among different commodities’ prices (e.g. soybean spot and soybean meal futures) attain different values along the time series. Second, there is a substantial reduction in margin variance provided by the optimal multiproduct time-varying hedge ratios over single time-varying and naive hedge ratios, for both in- and out-of-sample data. Third, average optimal multiproduct time-varying hedge ratios for soybean and soybean meal (0.82 and 0.74, respectively; for out-of-sample data) are significantly below the naive full hedge ratio, providing risk mitigation at lower costs.     

An Exploratory Study of the Level of Disaster Preparedness in the Canadian Hospitality Industry

Disaster planning is an important, but often neglected, part of leading an organization. Currently there exists little data on the level of disaster preparedness of organizations in the Canadian hospitality industry. In this article we present the results of a survey of a representative sample of organizations in this industry to assess the level of disaster preparedness. Results reveal an overall low level of preparedness. Implications of these results are discussed and recommendations for research and practice are suggested.