We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals’ preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove impossibility results which suggest that such evaluations encounter difficulties when the ob...

This paper is about a model of software delivery known as Software as a Service (SaaS). We believe that companies will pay for software as they pay for electricity and telephone. They will pay for what they use. We present why and when it happened. That it came from the outsourcing idea and became possible by the advances in the Internet. Software retailers will become service provides. The mai...

Despite structural limitations in the Bangladesh economy, the export sector performed well throughout the 1990s. The export growth rate of Bangladesh was higher than that of the world and the SAARC countries. However, the balance of trade of Bangladesh was always in deficit and the trade deficit with India is huge. The export share of primary commodities has decreased while that of manufactured...

For money-like informational commodities the notions of architectural adequacy and evolutionary adequacy are proposed as the first two stages of a moneyness maturity hierarchy. Then three classes of informational commodities are distinguished: exclusively informational commodities, strictly informational commodities, and ownable informational commodities. For each class money-like instances of ...

We investigate the determinants of aggregate commodity returns and establish the following findings. (1) Common predictors of bond and stock returns, such as the short rate and the yield spread, also predict commodity returns. A high yield spread predicts low commodity returns, consistent with commodities being a hedge for market fluctuations. (2) Even controlling for these common predictors, a...

This paper proposes and tests a theory of using commodities as collateral for financing. In the presence of capital control and financial frictions, financial investors import commodities and pledge them as collateral to capture the higher expected return in the importing country. The collateral demand for commodities increases commodity prices globally; it also increases futures risk premium i...

How globalization and international trade affect sustainable development and environment has attracted worldwide attention. Associated with the import and export of primary commodities, ecologically important materials have been exchanged among regions and countries. China, having the largest population in the world and the highest economic growth rate in last decades, may have an important inf...

In this paper, a new approach to risk minimizing vehicle routing and scheduling problem is presented. Forwarding agents or companies have two main concerns for the collection of high-risk commodities like cash or valuable commodities between the central depot and the customers: one; because of the high value of the commodities transported, the risk of ambush and robbery are very high. Two; the ...

This paper presents an equilibrium model of the term structure of forward prices for storable commodities. Our approach differs from Brennan (1991) and Schwartz (1997) in that we do not explicitly assume an exogenous "convenience yield." Rather, our spot commodity has an embedded timing option that is absent in forward contracts, which arises from a non-negativity constraint on inventory. The v...