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The functioning of commodity markets has changed related to processes of financialization that involve two major developments - the rise of financial interest on commodity derivative markets through the increasing presence of financial investors and the changing business models of international commodity trading houses and the increasing importance of these markets in price setting and risk management since the liberalization of national commodity sectors. A critical question is how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and distinct national market structures. This paper investigates how global financialization processes influence how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on commodity derivative markets, local actors in producer countries face the challenge of price instability and increased short-termism - albeit to different extents deepening on local market structures - with limited access to risk management.

Over the past three decades the global economy has witnessed the rise of organizationally fragmented and geographically dispersed global production networks (GPNs). An increasing amount of literature drawing on chain and network conceptualizations has accumulated on how these changes affect countries, regions and firms. Comparatively little has, however, been said about the effects on workers and their roles in GPNs. Although the expansion of global production arrangements has been an important source of employment generation in many developing and transition countries, this quantitative assessment reveals little about the qualitative aspects of work nor about the sustainability of these jobs. This paper assesses how integration into GPNs in the increasingly important fast fashion apparel segment, that is based on increased variety and fashionability and on permanently shrinking product life cycles, is impacting on workers and social upgrading. It particularly assesses whether the sourcing practices related to fast fashion, such as short lead times, high flexibility, speed of production, low costs and high quality, create additional hurdles for workers to achieve social upgrading. The focus is on the apparel industry in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Euro-Mediterranean Rim ("Greater Europe") with case studies on Morocco and Romania due to their importance as regional and fast fashion suppliers to Western European buyers.