A critique of financial neoliberalism: a perspective combining multidisciplinary methods and commodity markets

The era of financialization bas been marked by a huge increase in the size of the financial sector. The economic justifications for this expansion arise from the prevailing neo-liberal ideology; they are based on arguments like leading role of markets, economic efficiency, reallocation and spreading of risk. Given these reasons, financialization can be viewed as a form of neoliberalism and then we can use the term financial neoliberalism (Palley in Financialization: the economics of finance capital domination. Springer, 2016) to denote it. This commentary paper hopes to complement this view by highlighting the usefulness of recent “multidisciplinary” methods (i.e., methods which do not fall within the usual economic discipline). We focus first on the definition of financialization process, second on its implications on the commodity markets, and third and finally on the importance of the role of multidisciplinary methods, applied to these markets, capable of highlighting the contradictions of the neoliberalism framework, in such a way, we hope, to promote further research.

Resolving the SLOSS dilemma for biodiversity conservation: a research agenda

In biodiversity conservation, the “SL > SS principle” that a single (or few) large habitat patches (SL) conserve more species than several small patches (SS) is used to prioritize protection of large patches while down-weighting small ones. However, empirical support for this principle is lacking; most studies find SS > SL. We propose a research agenda to resolve this dilemma by asking, “are there consistent, empirically-demonstrated conditions leading to SL > SS?” We develop a hypothesis to answer this question, the “SLOSS cube hypothesis,” which predicts SL > SS only when all three of the following are true: between-patch movement is low, population dynamics are not influenced by spreading-of-risk, and large-scale across-habitat heterogeneity is low. We then propose methods to test this prediction. Many tests are needed, comparing gamma diversity across multiple landscapes varying in number and sizes of patches. If the prediction is not generally supported across tests, then either the mechanisms leading to SL > SS are extremely rare in nature, or they are outweighed by countervailing mechanisms leading to SS > SL (e.g. lower competition or higher immigration in SS), or both. In that case, the SL > SS principle should be abandoned.

An Analysis of Corporate Bonds Issuances in Malaysia

The objective of this study is to reveal an evocative statistical result on the bonds issuances for both, conventional bonds and Islamic bonds in Malaysia. Secondary data are obtained from Bondinfo hub, central bank of Malaysia on long-term and medium-term issuances of corporate bonds. There is 256 and 405 number of observations for long-term and medium-term issuances respectively. The independent samples T-test and Levene’s test are utilized for hypotheses testing. Results revealed that conventional bonds yields have larger spread compared to sukuk in long-term issuances. However in medium-term issuances, the spreading of risk is larger in sukuk compared to conventional bonds. To the issuer, sukuk issuances is the best option in long-term capital financing otherwise conventional bonds issuances is better for medium-term period since their commitment to pay contractual interest is low.

Variability of Carabidae in time and space in open areas

The temporal and spatial variability of carabid fauna was studied on a colliery spoil heap area in Germany and on an area of post-agricultural soil in Poland using pitfall traps. Applying Mean Individual Biomass (MIB) of carabids as an indicator of environmental quality, all plots were assessed as being young stages of succession. Species richness and total carabid abundance fluctuated remarkably among different plots and study years. Total numbers of individuals fluctuated significantly in time, whereas species richness remained strikingly constant. The Jaccard’s index ofspecies similarity was low for the level of individual sampling plots but high for the total catches when comparing different years. Individual species showed asynchronicity of fluctuations in numbers of individuals at the level of individual plots. Based on these results we suggest that the observed patterns can be explained by the ‘spreading of risk’ hypothesis.