I personally feel that it is imperative for a country to have a well-developed futures market. They enable growers, traders and end-users to benefit from improved riskmanagement practices. For the price discovery mechanism to be well-functioning, the futures market needs to command respectable volume and liquidity - the achievement of which is a goal that I feel we should set for ourselves. To sum up, the future of futures promises to be exciting and challenging. For TFEX, I hope that it gets off to a very successful start. For AFET, I am seeing a lot of potentials for it to be a futures market with sustainable growth and efficacy, enhancing the efficiency in the agricultural market. To realise its vision statements is only possible with full and complete cooperation from all of us. Again, I would urge the board of directors of AFET to take a lead and push for the much-needed change. Thank you. BIS Review 14/2006  3
Enter a title for the industry  Source: Labour Force Survey (user guidance)  10  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Chart 7: Compositional effects driven by  Chart 8: Job creation fell further, and has  characteristics of employees, not sectors  since recovered faster, for low skilled  Source: Labour Force Survey  Source: Labour Force Survey  Chart 9: Over longer sample, shifts in  We can’t demonstrate this with the detailed  average qualifications driven compositional  LFS dataset from 1994, as it includes only one  effects  proper cycle. But the positive relationship with unemployment exists even during the Great Stability (1994–2008). And, at the cost of a smaller set of variables – the survey didn’t ask people about their occupation and sectors before 1994 – we’ve managed to extend the estimates back a few years, to the late 1980s. The aggregate series you’ve already seen in Chart 310. The more detailed breakdown is in Chart 9. You can see clearly the same cyclical pattern during the last-but-one cycle: steeper falls in employment for the less well qualified during the recession, resulting in a positive  Source: Labour Force Survey  10  compositional effect, the opposite pattern in the upswing. The longer series simply splices on the pre-1994 estimates, based on the narrower sample, to the existing post-1994 series. One might ask how similar the two sets of estimates are in the overlapping post-1994 period, and the answer is that they’re close.