Search results

Reducing and eradicating global poverty features as a primary objective of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for 2030. Since over half a century, the World Bank has disbursed loans amounting to billions of US dollars to assist countries to alleviate poverty. However, the path to zero poverty is often impaired with conflicts, social unrest and, most commonly, economic crisis. In this chapter, we examine the inter-linkage between various forms of economic crises, poverty and government expenditure for a set of 127 countries from 1985 to 2010. Using a simultaneous equation model, we test the direct effect of a financial crisis on the incidence of poverty and its indirect effect through the immediate decrease in government expenditure. Contrary to previous studies, our findings suggest that crises have no direct impact on poverty. We find a similar effect for currency, inflation and debt crisis. However, there is evidence that poverty increases indirectly due to a fall in government expenditure. Our results are robust for non-advanced and advanced economies and alternate estimation technique using factor analysis.

The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms.

Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct.

Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts.

This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.

Previous studies have shown that the application of information technology (IT) can help break through the innovation boundaries of firms and has undoubtedly become a key enabler of collaborative innovation. These studies, however, are mainly based on theoretical analysis and case studies, and little is empirically known about the relationship between IT investments and collaborative innovation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to empirically explore how firms' IT investments affect the firms' collaborative innovation performance. The authors also examine the moderating roles of the top management team's (TMT's) educational background and absorptive capacity in this relationship.

The authors collected data on 2,097 listed Chinese manufacturing companies and used the ordinary least squares (OLS) method to perform regression analysis. In addition, the authors conducted robustness tests using the propensity score matching (PSM) method and the instrumental variable method.

The results show that the relationship between IT investments and collaborative innovation is inverted, U-shaped and curvilinear. In addition, the TMT's educational background and absorptive capacity positively moderate the inverted U-shaped relationship between IT investments and collaborative innovation.

The study's findings on the relationship between IT investments and collaborative innovation differ from previous mainstream findings that recognized a positive linear relationship. The authors' findings deepen the understanding of the dual role of IT investments. Moreover, this research helps expand the contingency perspective in IT investments and collaborative innovation research.

This study proposes a novel measure for management’s horizon (short-termism or myopia vs long-termism or hyperopia) derived from easily obtainable firm-level accounting and stock market performance data. The authors use the measure to explore the impact of managements’ horizon on firms’ investment efficiency.

The authors rely on two commonly used but uncorrelated measures of management performance: accounting performance (return on capital employed, ROCE) and stock market performance (average abnormal return, AAR). The authors combine these measures to develop a multidimensional framework for performance, which classifies firms into four groups: efficient (high accounting and high market performance), poor (low accounting and low market performance), myopic (high accounting and low market performance) and hyperopic (low accounting and high market performance). The authors validate this framework and deploy it to explore the relationship between horizon and firms’ investment efficiency.

In validation tests, the authors show that management myopia (hyperopia) explains firms’ decision to cut (grow) research and development investments. Further, as expected, myopic (hyperopic) firms are associated with significantly more (less) accrual and real earnings management. The empirical tests on the link between horizon and investment efficiency suggest that myopic managers cut new investments while their hyperopic counterparts grow the same. Ultimately, the authors find that myopia (hyperopia) exacerbates(mitigates) the over-investment of free cash flow problem.

The authors introduce a framework for assessing management’s horizon using easily obtainable measures of performance. The framework explains inconsistencies in prior empirical research using different measures of performance (accounting versus market). The authors demonstrate its utility by showing that the measure explains decisions around research and development investment, earnings management and firm investments.

The case is written based on publicly available data from primary sources such as the company’s annual reports, company website and the company’s presentations, as well as from secondary sources comprising newspaper articles, research papers, research magazines, magazine articles, industry reports, research reports, etc. as indicated in the references. The company’s financials and peer data are sourced from the Thomson Reuters Eikon database.

The case examines the financial position of Macy’s, Inc., America’s largest and one of the oldest premier departmental stores, with a consolidated annual turnover of US$18,097m in the fiscal year 2020/2021 (FY, 2021). Over the previous few years, the company had been struggling with decreasing market share and profitability mainly due to increasing competition from online retailers and deep discounters, which was affecting the company’s share price. With the appointment of a new chief executive officer (CEO) in fiscal year (FY) 2017, Macy’s, Inc. undertook several changes to revive its financial health and improve its market share. However, it still registered heavy losses of US$3,944m in the FY 2020/2021, the company’s first time in the past decade. With many retailers filing for bankruptcy, was there more that Macy’s could do to improve the company’s position and regain lost investor confidence? Will its entry into emerging markets play a crucial role in its turnaround?

The case can be used in undergraduate and postgraduate courses such as accounting for managers, financial statement analysis, management accounting, introduction to accounting and advanced financial statement analysis. The case can also be effectively used to understand the primary fundamental analysis of the company that involves understanding the company’s positioning and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. The case would also help business management and entrepreneurship students to get a preliminary idea about the change management process. Finally, the case can be used to familiarize students with using Microsoft Excel to build financial analysis worksheets.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

This study aims to explore the impact of environmental sustainability on government health expenditure in Africa for the period 2000–2021.

The study employs the generalized method of moments (GMM) technique and utilizes a sample of 43 African countries.

The study reveals that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and renewable energy consumption have a positive relationship with health expenditure. For the control factors, we demonstrate that economic growth, urbanization and industrialization have a significant negative influence on health expenditure, while the impact of education on health expenditure is positive.

The study proposes several policy recommendations, including prioritizing investment in renewable energy sources and promoting the use of cleaner energy sources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric power. These measures would help improve environmental quality and reduce government health expenditure.

The study contributes to the limited research on the relationship between environmental quality and health expenditure in Africa. Moreover, it goes beyond previous studies that only considered CO2 emissions and explores the impact of adopting cleaner energy sources on health expenditure.

This study aims to investigate the impact of local windfall gains from the Spanish Christmas lottery on household consumption behavior.

The study applies differences-in-differences to assess permanent income hypothesis (PIH) validity, examining pre- and postlottery consumption effects. Additionally, it also uses an instrumental variable regression, using the lottery shock as an instrument for total expenditures, to estimate the Engel curves.

The paper finds a PIH violation; households in winning region notably increase consumption on durable and nondurable goods compared to nonwinning ones. Moreover, durable goods consumption is responsive to lottery winnings, while nondurable goods consumption are unit-elastic to expenditure shocks.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper analyzing the effects of winning regions of the Spanish Christmas lottery in all types of consumption goods, testing its consequences in the PIH and estimating its effects in the Engel curves.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of government health expenditure on the health of children (under-five mortality rate and prevalence rate of stunting) among West African countries.

The study utilizes heterogeneous panel from the period 1990 to 2018 among 16 West African countries for the analysis. The effect of government health expenditure on under-five mortality rate is measured in per 1,000 live births while that of stunting is measured in percentage. The study employs Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimation technique and Impulse Response Functions (IRFs) for the analysis.

The results indicate that government health expenditure has negative effect on under-five mortality rate and prevalence rate of stunting in the long-run but not significant in the short-run. In addition, the IRFs result indicates that under-five mortality rate and prevalence rate of stunting both respond negatively to shocks in government health expenditure.

Governments should ensure that inefficiencies in the public health sector are reduced by licensing the health workers of this sector and allowing independent bodies to appoint the heads of health institutions. This will improve the delivering of health services for the health of children.

Previous studies carried out have not examined the short-run and long-run effects of the relationship under study among West African countries.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2022-0212

There is extensive literature on the effect of military expenditure on economic growth. However, there is also a wide gap in the literature on the relationship between productivity and innovation, which is considered the driving force of economic growth and military expenditures. To this end, this study examines the effect of military expenditures on economic growth, innovation and labor productivity for the period 1995–2019 in most militarized countries.

The tests used in the study's empirical analysis are techniques that take into account cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity. The stationarity of the variables was tested with the Pesaran’s (2007) unit root test. Then, empirical findings were revealed based on the analysis through Westerlund’s (2008) cointegration test and Emirmahmutoglu and Kose’s (2011) panel causality test.

According to the empirical results, there is a long-run relationship, in other words, a cointegration between military expenditures and productivity, innovation and economic growth. Additionally, there are causality relationships between military expenditures and productivity, innovation and economic growth.

These results support the arguments of military Keynesianism and the Benoit hypothesis.

Despite the widespread theoretical debate, no empirical study tests the effect of military expenditure on productivity and innovation to the author's best knowledge. Hence, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature. Moreover, the fact that the econometric method used is based on second generation tests and the timeliness of the period range makes the study's findings more significant.

In Ghana, legal and illegal artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) activities have attracted the attention of the general populace and academia with varied opinions. This study examined how adopting the coping strategies for ASM operations affected the welfare of farm households.

Primary data were solicited from respondents using a semi-structured questionnaire. This paper used the endogenous treatment effect model to quantitatively estimate whether or not farmers who adopt coping strategies for activities of ASM have improved or deteriorated welfare.

The results revealed that households adopted coping strategies such as diversification, social networking, land reclamation, borrowing, dependence on the market for food and resettlement in other communities. The endogenous treatment effect model results show that households that adopted land reclamation and social networking had improved welfare regarding consumption expenditure and food security compared to non-adopters. Conversely, diversification was associated with lower consumption expenditures and high food insecurity among adopters.

This paper recommends that farm households in mining communities form cooperatives and farmer-based organizations to ensure improved access to joint resources for enhanced capacity to cope with ASM-induced shocks. There is a need for government and civil society organizations to encourage and support land reclamation measures.

This paper covers a broader perspective and deploys more than one welfare proxy, which has not been considered before in previous studies.