Published Papers

Following the importance of gold in the global economy and the high interest that has attracted recently, the objective of this paper is twofold: to predict the price of gold by using the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and compare its forecasting accuracy with various time-series forecasting methods and the 'Buy and Hold' (B&H) strategy. The results show that the ANFIS's accuracy is far superior to the performance of all compared methods and therefore ANFIS demonstrates the potential of neuro fuzzy-based modelling for predicting the gold's price.

We show that the application of flexible semi-parametric statistical techniques enables significant improvements in model fitting of macroeconomic models. As applied to the explanation of the past economic growth (since 1900) in US, UK and Japan, the new results demonstrate quite conclusively the non-linear relationships between capital, labour and useful energy with economic growth. They also indicate that output elasticities of capital, labour and useful energy are extremely variable over time. We suggest that these results confirm the economic intuition that growth since the industrial revolution has been driven largely by declining energy costs due to the discovery and exploitation of relatively inexpensive fossil fuel resources. Implications for the 21st century, which are also discussed briefly by exploring the implications of an ACEGES-based scenario of oil production, are as follows: (a) the provision of adequate and affordable quantities of useful energy as a pre-condition for economic growth and (b) the design of energy systems as 'technology incubators' for a prosperous 21st century.

The sustainability agenda is becoming an important element in business education. This is because there is a growing understanding of the need to develop strategic thinking that safeguards the long-term sustainability of business. To that end the Agent-based Computational Economics of the Global Energy System (ACEGES) project is introduced as a novel framework for developing a new generation of long-term decision scenarios. At a more general level, the project raises awareness of sustainable thinking in long-term business planning by means of controlled computational experiments. This paper describes the ACEGES tool, which has been introduced at a business school in the UK to educate students in the art and science of sustainable strategic thinking.