fair trade towards an economics of virtue over the past 10 years the sales of fair trade goods particularly those carrying the fair trade labelling organizations international flo certification mark have grown exponentially academic interest in fair trade has also grown significantly over the past decade with researchers analysing the model from a wide range of theoretical perspectives whilst fair trade is generally acknowledged as a new supply chain model it has tended to be studied at the micro organisational level rather than at the macro systems level as a consequence its wider impact as institutional innovation at the field level appears to have been under theorised so far in order to address this research gap this article uses a neo institutionalist perspective to analyse fair trade not simply as a new exchange model working within existing organisational and economic structures but rather as an agent of institutional entrepreneurship at and beyond the field level from this latter perspective fair trade brings a new set of transformational meanings to extant exchange and consumption models and reforms fields of economic exchange by disrupting and then re assembling key institutional elements around modern consumption to roll back commodity fetishism and reconnect consumers and producers the type of institutional change driven by fair trade can be seen as a form of social entrepreneurship

fair trade standards corporate participation and social movement responses in the united states this article examines the development of and contestation over the standards for certified fair trade with particular attention to the u s context it charts fair trade s rapid growth in the united states since the 1999 advent of formal certification explores the controversies generated by the strategy of market mainstreaming in the sector and focuses on five key issues that have generated particularly heated contention within the u s fair trade movement it offers a theoretical framework based in the literatures on agrifood systems social movements and public choice economics for understanding the corporate response to alternative markets such as fair trade the article suggests a typology of responses by social movement actors to this increased corporate participation and assesses the relevance of the u s case for the future prospects of fair trade both in other national contexts and as an international movement

what will consumers pay for social product features the importance of ethical consumerism to many companies worldwide has increased dramatically in recent years ethical consumerism encompasses the importance of non traditional and social components of a company s products and business process to strategic success such as environmental protectionism child labor practices and so on the present paper utilizes a random utility theoretic experimental design to provide estimates of the relative value selected consumers place on the social features of products

for love or money fairtrade business models in the uk supermarket sector sales in supermarkets have contributed greatly to growth in fairtrade but the literature suggests there may be tensions between fairtrade principles and the commercial practices which characterise uk supermarket value chains this article explores these tensions through an analysis of supermarket value chains for fairtrade coffee cocoa bananas and fresh fruit it finds considerable variation in uk supermarket approaches in terms of scale and scope of commitment to fairtrade and in the nature of relationships with fairtrade suppliers in some cases supermarket involvement has the potential both to expand and deepen the impact of fairtrade whereas in others it threatens to undermine the ability of fairtrade to support long term processes of development the findings indicate that a more nuanced approach to supermarket fairtrade is required with recommendations for actions that could be taken to maximise the opportunities and minimise the risks

towards a framework for understanding fairtrade purchase intention in the mainstream environment of supermarkets despite growing interest in ethical consumer behaviour research ambiguity remains regarding what motivates consumers to purchase ethical products while researchers largely attribute the growth of ethical consumerism to an increase in ethical consumer concerns and motivations widened distribution mainstreaming of ethical products such as fairtrade questions these assumptions a model that integrates both individual and societal values into the theory of planned behaviour is presented and empirically tested to challenge the assumption that ethical consumption is driven by ethical considerations alone using data sourced from fairtrade shoppers across the uk structural equation modelling suggests that fairtrade purchase intention is driven by both societal and self interest values this dual value pathway helps address conceptual limitations inherent in the underlying assumptions of existing ethical purchasing behaviour models and helps advance understanding of consumers motivation to purchase ethical products

environmental accounting useful to whom and for what abstract the development of statistics as with any other tool can only be understood in relation to their particular uses this is confirmed by the development of national income estimates and of the national accounts proposals to integrate environmental costs and benefits into the national accounts can similarly only be evaluated by considering them in the context of their likely policy use the most important potential use is as a general measure of welfare or progress for policy to aim to maximise environmentally adjusted national accounts correspond to a very weak view of sustainability the use of adjusted national income as a measure of welfare essentially assumes complete substitutability between manufactured and natural capital problems of monetary valuation are likely to lead to huge underestimation of environmental costs issues of inequality and poverty essential to a more robust view of sustainability are ignored policy targeting a revised national income will continue to aim for ever higher output while making very limited concessions to environmental concerns adjusting the national accounts for environmental costs is not the only way to ensure they are allowed for in policy making an alternative approach more appropriate if sustainable development in the stronger sense is to be achieved is the construction and use of a set of social and environmental indicators

the dynamics of fair trade as a mixed form market this article analyses the fair trade sector as a mixed form market i e a market in which different types of players in this case nonprofit co operative and for profit organizations coexist and compete the purposes of this article are 1 to understand the factors that have led fair trade to become a mixed form market and 2 to propose some trails to understand the market dynamics that result from the interactions between the different types of players we start by defining briefly fair trade its different dimensions including the fair quality of the products and its organizational landscape focusing on the distinction between the pioneer alternative trading organizations and the second mover companies then we recall the theoretical emergence factors for each type of organization nonprofit co operative and for profit and apply these emergence factors to the context of fair trade this analysis allows us to capture the specificities of each type of operator with regard to fair trade and thus to have a better understanding of the dynamics in the sector such dynamics includes competition but also conflict and partnership our analysis includes elements on ethical imitation consumers behaviors effects on welfare and the role of the government

some remarks on the system of integrated environmental and economic accounting of the united nations abstract the publication of the system of integrated environmental and economic accounting seea by the united nations marked a decisive advance in the discussion of environmental accounting and will have a great influence on the design of national environmental accounting systems seea contains a great variety of definitions methods and procedures before this important system will be adopted on a broad basis it may be useful to point out certain basic problems connected with it in this article we will concentrate on two main problem areas first the fundamental incompatibility of economic and ecological spatial and time scales and second the questionable emphasis placed on data artificially generated with the help of hypotheses rather than on data based on empirical observations the following discussion leads to the consequence that monetary valuations of environmental facts should be avoided because of the incompatibility of economic and ecological scales the authors propose to renounce to a large extent full integration of these two aspects instead one should concentrate on the two following aims development of a classification for a systematic description of the anthropogenic alterations of environmental factors and a compilation of a variety of coordinated indicators which at widely differing aggregation levels and with a wide range of methods and scales would help to observe changes in environmental quality over time within at least a rough framework

focus on fairtrade propositions for integrating fairtrade and supply chain management research driven by increased consumer interest and stakeholder pressure the number of fairtrade ft products has been steadily increasing the mainstreaming of ft means that the products are now facing stiff competition within the generic product categories in which they operate while consumers may pressure organizations for ethical conduct they are less willing to pay premium prices for fairly traded products for ft to continue to grow more efficient operating models are required to offset the premium prices paid to producers to ensure competitiveness in the market one such improvement approach may be the management of ft supply chains to investigate the feasibility of this approach this article systematically combines literature on ft with key supply chain management scm constructs and theories we discuss existing scm paradigms in the context of ft and demonstrate aspects where the efficiency of ft chains needs to be improved to ensure their viability we present propositions that demonstrate the key limitations of the ft model from the point of view of scm theory and practice and suggest the potential changes needed in the management of ft supply chains the article provides a timely first attempt to systematically combine ft with scm constructs thus establishing a basis for the further development of ft chains and for the improvement of the operating efficiency within them

through thick and thin how fair trade consumers have reacted to the global economic recession research on fair trade has flourished over the past decade as fair trade food products have gained popularity amongst consumers in many developed economies this study examines the effects of recessionary economic conditions on fair trade consumers purchasing behaviour an online survey was administered to 306 fair trade consumers from canada the united kingdom and the united states of america the results reveal a discrepancy among fair trade consumers as only consumers that purchase fair trade on an occasional basis adhered to established consumer behaviour norms i e decreasing their purchases of fair trade products and becoming significantly more price aware respondents who actively consume fair trade generally remained loyal to their purchase while some active consumers altered their purchasing behaviour this phenomenon was not common amongst this group as no statistically significant changes were observed differences were also noted among the three countries as the canadian and us fair trade consumers significantly decreased their consumption of fair trade as a result of the recession whereas the uk consumers did not in addition to the research results theoretical and managerial implications will be discussed along with future research directions

sustainability indicators policy and governance issues for ecological economics abstract ecological economics is a major forum for discussion of theoretical and analytical aspects of measuring sustainability the role of sustainability indicators as an evaluation method for sustainability within the emerging context of governance merits further analysis focusing on policy processes surrounding the production of sustainability indicators this paper addresses two questions what is the potential utility of indicators for policy and in what ways can indicators influence governance the former is addressed by exploring three disciplines with long histories of indicator application public administration studies urban studies and environmental sciences the latter is addressed by distilling key perspectives from public policy literature on knowledge utilisation and policy learning which become the foundation for clarifying the notion of policy resonant indicators this clarification is achieved by canvassing the spectrum of the influences on indicators and the mechanisms of their resonance in policy processes the final section of the paper brings these arguments together by exploring two major insights in terms of challenges for ecological economics strengthening indicator theory and practice by addressing four key ingredients and mobilisation of indicators through their active use within the context of governance

pricing and static hedging of american style options under the jump to default extended cev model abstract this paper prices and hedges american style options through the static hedge approach shp proposed by chung and shih 2009 and extends the literature in two directions first the shp approach is generalized to the jump to default extended cev jdcev model of carr and linetsky 2006 and plain vanilla american style options on defaultable equity are priced the robustness and efficiency of the proposed pricing solutions are compared with the optimal stopping approach offered by nunes 2009 under both the jdcev framework and the nested constant elasticity of variance cev model of cox 1975 using different elasticity parameter values second the early exercise boundary near expiration is derived under the jdcev model

the fair trade movement parameters issues and future research although fair trade has been in existence for more than 40 years discussion in the business and business ethics literature of this unique trading and campaigning movement between southern producers and northern buyers and consumers has been limited this paper seeks to redress this deficit by providing a description of the characteristics of fair trade including definitional issues market size and segmentation and the key organizations it discusses fair trade from southern producer and northern trader and consumer perspectives and highlights the key issues that currently face the fair trade movement it then identifies an initial research agenda to be followed up in subsequent papers

stakeholder forces of socially responsible supply chain management orientation this project investigates salient stakeholder forces of socially responsible supply chain orientation srsco in the apparel and footwear sector focusing on fair labor management issues srsco was conceptualized as a composite of internal organizational direction and external partnership for a creation and continuation of fair labor conditions throughout the supply chain primary stakeholders identified were consumers regulation industry and media a total of 209 mail survey responses from sourcing managers of u s apparel and footwear companies were analyzed two dimensions of srsco were confirmed internal direction and external partnership consumer and industry peer pressures were found significantly related to internal direction while industry peers and media were significantly related to the external partnership regulation was not significantly related to either internal direction or external partnerships lack of regulation forces to govern labor issues and roles of consumers industry peers and media in promoting fair labor management are discussed in this article

fair trade managerial practices strategy organisation and engagement the number of distributors selling fair trade products is constantly increasing what are their motivations to distribute fair trade products how do they organise this distribution do they apply and communicate the fair trade values this research based on five case studies in switzerland aims at understanding and structuring the strategies and the managerial practices related to fair trade product distribution as well as analysing if they denote an engagement with fair trade principles the results show a high heterogeneity of strategies and engagement in general strategies implemented by mainstream actors contribute to increase fair trade global sales but do not convey the transformative message of fair trade through their engagement the latter is rather communicated through alternative channels problems and potential solutions to this issue are discussed

an exploration of opportunities for the growth of the fair trade market three cases of craft organisations businesses that maintain ethical standards have an advantage in the marketplace based on the increasing interest of consumers in products that have a social and ethical component fair trade organisations that adopt environmental social and ethical principles in trading are in a good position to make the most of this growing interest in the market however it is unclear whether fair trade organisations are taking full advantage of emerging market opportunities for ethically traded products this research explores this issue by describing the business strategies of three fair trade organisations that import and sell craft goods into western countries and evaluates them in the context of this growing market the research findings indicate that in order to remain in business fair trade craft organisations have had to adopt better business practices in recent years improving quality customer service and product offerings to customers however growth appears to be limited as distribution remains focused on a small niche market this paper explores the distribution strategies of two fair trade commodity organisations that are successfully reaching a wider customer base demonstrating that fair trade products have a unique selling advantage in the mainstream marketplace in conclusion fair trade craft organisations are not exploiting this market opportunity to the degree they should and will need to explore wider distribution and alternative business strategies to expand their market share

the missing link between corporate social responsibility and consumer trust the case of fair trade products this paper investigates the link between the consumer perception that a company is socially oriented and the consumer intention to buy products marketed by that company we suggest that this link exists when at least two conditions prevail 1 the products sold by that company comply with ethical and social requirements 2 the company has an acknowledged commitment to protect consumer rights and interests to test these hypotheses we conducted a survey among the clients of retail chains offering fair trade products the results show that socially oriented companies can successfully leverage their reputation to market products with high symbolic values

fair trade three key challenges for reaching the mainstream after nearly 20 years of work by activists fair trade a movement establishing alternative trading organizations to ensure minimal returns safe working conditions and environmentally sustainable production is now gaining steam with increasing awareness and availability across a variety of products however this article addresses several major remaining challenges a a lack of agreement about what fair trade really means and how it should be certified b uneven awareness and availability across different areas with marked differences between some parts of europe and north america that reflect more fundamental debates about distribution c larger questions about the extent of the potential contribution of fair trade to development under the current system including limitations on the number and types of workers affected and the fair trade focus on commodity goods

a measure of sustainable national income for the netherlands abstract we present calculations on the sustainable national income sni indicator first proposed by hueting which corrects net national income nni for the costs to bring back environmental resource use to a sustainable level using an applied general equilibrium age model specifying 27 production sectors we calculate different variants of sni for the netherlands in 1990 given a set of pre determined sustainability standards the age model is extended with emissions and abatement cost curves based on large data sets for nine environmental themes the model combines the advantages of a top down approach the age model with the information of a bottom up approach the environmental data and data on emissions reductions costs the presented numerical results show that in 1990 dutch sni is about 50 below nni though many uncertainties are still present in the data and the model the enhanced greenhouse effect is the most expensive environmental theme

errata for the article pricing and static hedging of american style options under the jump to default extended cev model abstract this errata corrects an error in ruas et al 2013 equation 27 and updates the numerical results contained in ruas et al 2013 tables 4 and 5 the material provided here is meant to be read strictly in conjunction with ruas et al 2013

what do corporations have to do with fair trade positive and normative analysis from a value chain perspective there has been tremendous growth in the sales of certified fair trade products since the introduction of the first of these goods in the netherlands in 1988 many would argue that this rapid growth has been due in large part to the increasing involvement of corporations still participation by corporations in fair trade has not been welcomed by all the basic point of contention is that while corporate participation has the potential to rapidly extend the market for fair trade goods it threatens key aspects of what many see as the original vision of fair trade most notably a primary concern for the plight of small producers and the goal of developing an alternative approach to trade and development and may even be undermining its long term survival the primary purpose of this article is to explore the normative issues involved in corporate participation in fair trade in order to do that however it first provides a positive analysis of how corporations are actually involved in fair trade in order to achieve both of these ends the article draws upon global value chain analysis

are fair trade goods credence goods a new proposal with french illustrations in the literature fair trade ft goods are usually associated with other products differentiated by process attributes such as organic food genetically modified gm food or child labour free clothing all of these products are regarded as credence goods this classification refers to the simplified definition of credence goods which describes product attributes which consumers cannot evaluate even after having consumed the good focusing on the characteristics of ft goods this article proposes a reassessment of the link between ft goods and credence properties as defined by darby and karni we first demonstrate that 1 the usual classification masks important particularities of ft goods compared to other goods with process attributes and 2 the full definition of credence goods may even provide a better description of the quality of ft goods however and this is our second theoretical contribution the lack of consensus among experts concerning ft standards and their level of efficiency encourage us to consider ft goods as indeterminate goods as defined by lupton this result leads us to suggest a new typology of product attributes summarized in an innovative diagram it sheds light on how competition between the different ft approaches works and why the ft market is still confined to a niche if not threatened with collapse we mainly illustrate our theoretical analysis with observations relating to the french ft market and institutions

pricing american options under the constant elasticity of variance model and subject to bankruptcy this paper proposes an alternative characterization of the early exercise premium that is valid for any markovian and diffusion underlying price process as well as for any parameterization of the exercise boundary this new representation is shown to provide the best pricing alternative available in the literature for medium and long term american option contracts under the constant elasticity of variance model moreover the proposed pricing methodology is also extended easily to the valuation of american options on defaultable equity and possesses appropriate asymptotic properties

ethical sourcing codes of large uk based corporations prevalence content limitations codes of conduct have become the perhaps most often used tool to manage corporate social responsibility csr researchers have primarily analysed such documents at company wide or trans company levels whereas there is a dearth of studies into the use of codes for particular corporate functions hence this article will examine one particular group of sub company level codes namely codes of conduct that stipulate csr criteria for suppliers examining such ethical sourcing policies adopted by the ftse100 corporations the article draws out what environmental social and economic issues large corporations perceive to be important in the management of their supply chains at an aggregate level the coverage of csr issues is rather extensive yet at the level of the individual corporation a degree of selectivity in the issues that are addressed becomes noticeable the code content analysis furthermore confirms the business case and public pressure to be the most important drivers of csr finally the study highlights the role of isomorphic processes in the adoption of csr tools

the contribution of environmental and social standards towards ensuring legitimacy in supply chain governance increasingly companies implement social and environmental standards as instruments towards corporate social responsibility csr in supply chains this is based on the assumption that such standards increase legitimacy among stakeholders yet a wide variety of standards with different requirement levels exist and companies might tend to introduce the ones with low exigencies using them as a legitimacy front this strategy jeopardizes the reputation of social and environmental standards among stakeholders and their long term trust in these instruments of csr meaning that all expenses for their implementation are of no avail for the companies therefore this paper highlights which criteria are important for the selection implementation and improvement in order to achieve a company s aim but also to strengthen the legitimacy of social and environmental standards this research is based on conceptual thought and some existing empirical research comparing four different social and environmental standards revealing weaknesses and strengths it exposes the basic conditions for the success of such standards among stakeholders and identifies the need for more empirical data