In recent years a number of market participants called into question the efficiency of the price discoverymechanism in commodity futures markets. They believe that speculators move commodity futures marketsaway from their fundamentals by distorting prices and exacerbating volatility. The smoking...

Micro-finance, which includes micro-credit as one of its core services, has become an important component of a range of business models – from those that operate on a strictly economic basis to those that come from a philanthropic base, through Non Government Organisations (NGOs). Its success...

Over the last decade outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) flows and stocks from the emerging economies expanded dramatically. This aggregate trend is reflective of the fact that at the firm level technological capabilities and market share of many TNCs from the emerging economies (ETNCs)...

Die Weltwirtschaftskrise des Jahres 1929 beendete ein „goldenes Zeitalter“. Sie veränderte nachhaltig die internationale Völkergemeinschaft, unter anderem in Bezug auf den Welthandel, die Finanzströme und die Arbeitslosigkeit. Die Auswirkungen unserer heutigen Krise scheinen vergleichbar,...

The accurate fitting of a circle to noisy measurements of points on its circumference is an important and much-studied problem in statistics. Atherton & Kerbyson (Image and Vision Computing 17, 1999, 795-803) have proposed a complex convolutional circle parameter estimator. One of the estimators...

China's accession to the WTO means significant increases in export opportunities for China's trading partners. This study attempts to identify and measure quantitatively the effects of changing economic environment and trade policies on China's agricultural imports from the European Union (EU)....