Pushing the boundaries of the social: private agri-food standards and the governance of Fair Trade in European public procurement

The article explores how fair trade and associated private agri-food standards are incorporated into public procurement in Europe. Procurement law is underpinned by principles of equity, non-discrimination and transparency; one consequence is that legal obstacles exist to fair trade being privileged within procurement practice. These obstacles have pragmatic dimensions, concerning whether and how procurement can be used to fulfil wider social policy objectives or to incorporate private standards; they also bring to the fore underlying issues of value. Taking an agency-based approach and incorporating the concept of governability, empirical evidence demonstrates the role played by different actors in negotiating fair trade’s passage into procurement through pre-empting and managing legal risk. This process exposes contestations that arise when contrasting values come together within sustainable procurement. This examination of fair trade in public procurement helps reveal how practices and knowledge on ethical consumption enter into a new governance arena within the global agri-food system.

International office investment in global cities: the production of financial space and systemic risk

The paper explores the relationships between UK commercial real estate and regional economic development as a foundation for the analysis of the role of real estate investment in local economic development. Linkages between economic growth, development, real estate performance and investment allocations are documented. Long-run regional property performance is not the product of long-run economic growth, and weakly related to indicators of long-run supply and demand. Changes in regional portfolio weights seem driven by neither market performance nor underlying fundamentals. In the short run, regional investment shifts show no clear leads or lags with market performance.

Economic commodity or environmental crisis? An interdisciplinary approach to analysing the bushmeat trade in central and west Africa

Bushmeat is a large but largely invisible contributor to the economies of west and central African countries. Yet the trade is currently unsustainable. Hunting is reducing wildlife populations, driving more vulnerable species to local and regional extinction, and threatening biodiversity. This paper uses a commodity chain approach to explore the bushmeat trade and to demonstrate why an interdisciplinary approach is required if the trade is to be sustainable in the future.

Islamic mutual funds' financial performance and international investment style: evidence from 20 countries

We pursue the first large-scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias-adjusted data set, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from 20 countries. As Islamic funds often have diverse investment regions, we develop a (conditional) three-level Carhart model to simultaneously control for exposure to different national, regional and global equity markets and investment styles. Consistent with recent evidence for conventional funds, we find Islamic funds to display superior learning in more developed Islamic financial markets. While Islamic funds from these markets are competitive to international equity benchmarks, funds from especially Western nations with less Islamic assets tend to significantly underperform. Islamic funds’ investment style is somewhat tilted towards growth stocks. Funds from predominantly Muslim economies also show a clear small cap preference. These results are consistent over time and robust to time varying market exposures and capital market restrictions.

Residential investment and sustainable communities

This research examines the scope for more private rented housing as part of securing housing choice and affordability. A comprehensive review covers the current UK planning, housing and investment framework. It examines UK valuation practice and draws lessons from the Netherlands and Canada. UK case studies illustrate how private companies and social organisations are challenging commonly perceived barriers to mixed-use, mixed-tenure and rented housing through imaginative developments and investments. Additionally, the case studies incorporate financial appraisals of actual schemes and illustrate the reasons for different approaches by private and social organisations to assessing financial feasibility, based on their individual objectives. The report provides a practical resource for property professionals, investors and developers as well as an aid to policy makers in understanding property and investment market responses. The research was funded through the Pat Allsop Education Trust.

State ownership, bank loans, and corporate investment

We study the effect of bank loans on Chinese publicly listed firms' investment decisions based on the underinvestment and overinvestment theories of leverage. Evidence from China is of particular importance because China is the world's largest emerging and transitional economy. At first we show that there is a negative relationship between bank loan ratios and investment for Chinese publicly listed firms. And this negative relationship is much stronger for firms with low growth than firms with high growth. Secondly, we find that both short-term and long-term loan ratios are negatively correlated with investment. However, the higher the long-term loan ratios are, the weaker the negative relationship between long-term loan ratios and investment is. Thirdly, firm ownership only matters to the effect of short-term bank loans on investment in our sample. That is, the negative relationship between short-term loan ratios and investment is weaker for SOEs than for non-SOEs. Lastly, we show that the reform of China's banking system in 2003 has not strengthened the negative relationship between bank loans and investment. Our findings suggest that although Chinese state-owned banks are severely intervened by government policies, they still have a disciplining role on firms' investment, especially in firms with low growth.