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The cultural and legal differences between foreign acquirers and African target firms can be substantial. There is also a large variation in cultures and legal systems within Africa. However, there is limited research on merger and acquisition (M&A) performance by foreign firms in Africa. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by exploring the “spillover by law” hypothesis (Martynova and Renneboog, 2008) that focuses on the influence of the external environment on the governance and performance of foreign M&As in Africa.

The data set covers 415 M&A transactions by foreign firms in Africa during the period of 1999–2016. Dynamic data covering the country’s legal, cultural and political environment are collected from the World Bank, the Heritage Foundation and Transparency International.

The authors find that the legal environment significantly affects the returns of bidders on African firms. For complete acquisitions, bidder returns are significantly higher when the bidder’s country has higher shareholder protection and higher creditor protection compared with the target firm’s country. The results show that the effects are significant when there is a full control change (including a change in the target firm’s nationality) but not in the case of partial control transfers. The results are consistent with the “spillover by law” hypothesis.

The authors contribute to the literature on cross-border M&As by separately studying the valuation effects of full, majority and minority changes in control; by being the first study of the legal spillover effects in Africa; and by being the most extensive study of the legal determinants of the valuations of non-African acquirers of African firms.

Research suggests that context matters for MNEs’ international business strategy. MNEs’ strategies vary when different intertwined contexts interact with each other. While International Business scholars understand well the influence of the institutional environments on firms’ international strategies and operations, some contextual differences are less understood as is the case involving African countries and firms. In this study we investigate how different institutional contexts and legitimacy challenges combine to impact ownership strategic choices of African firms in their cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). Specifically, we study the influence of the host country institutional development and two institutional dimension distances: administrative distance and knowledge distance. Methodologically, we use a sample of 314 CBAs made by acquirers from 24 African countries in 71 host countries worldwide to test a number of theoretically driven hypotheses. This study contributes to our understanding of how foreign investors from less institutionally developed countries that are more likely to face higher legitimacy barriers use ownership strategies to achieve legitimacy abroad.

The purpose of this article is to address certain gaps and contribute to enriching the literature on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in Africa; describe the phenomenon taking into account the particularity of the country; address recommendations to public policies and investors and make this article a ground-breaking article on research into the phenomenon of the M&A market in North Africa.

With description and an exploratory intention, the authors develop phenomenon driven research. As appropriate phenomenon driven research, the authors focus on characteristics of Moroccan M&A market. The authors use scientific investigation to provide descriptions and explanations of the phenomena in order to add a new perspective to the M&A literature in North African region. The authors work on the particularity of companies in Morocco, typology of M&A, geographic areas, socio-economic indicators, trade agreements, politics and culture.

Understand that the phenomenon of domestic M&A is a phenomenon of big cities and knows the participation of small and medium enterprises. The political variable, the trade agreements and the socio-economic weight of the countries influence the cross-border M&A in to out. Sharing a border and common culture has no impact on cross-border M&A but the history of colonization has an impact.

The scientific contribution is first an extension of the neoclassical theory on the initiation of M&A operations. Throughout these 29 years of history, the existence of external shocks such as regulations has influenced the activity of M&A operations. Privatization, partial opening of sectors to foreign investment tax incentives have contributed to the realization of M&A operations.

This paper also has an economic and practical contribution, as it informs about the absence of M&A operation in the agriculture and agri-food sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. This region recognizes a food shortage that will increase by 70–100% between 2010 and 2050 with a strong population growth. The authors also note that regulations, royal directives, influence the activity and geographic choices of M&A. The political variable remains decisive for the cross-border M&A activity between Morocco and Algeria, but encourages acquisitions in countries in West and Central Africa.

M&A research in Africa is poor and suffers from several shortcomings; these barriers push researchers to produce fewer papers on this phenomenon. Through data collection, description and explanation, the authors tried to produce a paper focusing on the M&A phenomenon in a country in North Africa. To the authors’ knowledge, no article has dealt with this phenomenon in this country which is known for its strong M&A activity.

Recent empirical findings on the relationship between internationalization and firm performance (I–P) suggest a significant role of firm's context. Extending this line of argument, the authors study the effect of internationalization on firm's performance for emerging market firms from knowledge-intensive industries, taking into account the firm's motive of internationalization and host country’s location-based advantages.

The authors link host country-specific advantages (CSAs) with firm-specific advantages (FSAs) to identify three distinct settings of internationalization for emerging economy firms – (1) asset-exploitative internationalization in developing or least developed countries, (2) asset-exploitative internationalization in developed countries and (3) strategic asset-seeking internationalization. The authors test this study’s hypotheses on a sample of 415 Indian firms from knowledge-intensive industries.

The authors find that firm's performance upon internationalization is non-linear in each of the three different settings. The nature of the non-linear relationship depends upon location-based advantages of the host country and the motive of internationalization.

The motive of internationalization and the location-based advantages sought during internationalization are unique for emerging economy firms. Hence, the study extends understanding of the I–P linkage in an emerging economy context.

Describes the development of the African Newspaper Union List by the Africana Librarians Council of the African Studies Association, in conjunction with the Center for Research Libraries. The process involved selecting a project which was attractive to funding agencies, effectively addressed a real problem of Africana libraries, and would not overburden already busy staff at the participating libraries. The difficulties that had to be overcome included the challenge of developing a high‐tech project for librarians whose main experience with technology was limited to its use in library service, not its design and implementation. Other challenges were the nature of the problems of acquiring publications from Africa, and the small pool of participating librarians who were widely scattered geographically, each in quite different institutional settings.

This paper tests whether employers responded particularly negatively to African American job applicants during the deep U.S. recession that began in 2007. Theories of labor queuing and social closure posit that members of privileged groups will act to minimize labor market competition in times of economic turbulence, which could advantage Whites relative to African Americans. Although social closure should be weakest in the less desirable, low-wage job market, it may extend downward during recessions, pushing minority groups further down the labor queue and exacerbating racial inequalities in hiring. We consider two complementary data sources: (1) a field experiment with a randomized block design and (2) the nationally representative NLSY97 sample. Contrary to expectations, both analyses reveal a comparable recession-based decline in job prospects for White and African American male applicants, implying that hiring managers did not adapt new forms of social closure and demonstrating the durability of inequality even in times of structural change. Despite this proportionate drop, however, the recession left African Americans in an extremely disadvantaged position. Whites during the recession obtained favorable responses from employers at rates similar to African Americans prior to the recession. The combination of experimental methods and nationally representative longitudinal data yields strong evidence on how race and recession affect job prospects in the low-wage labor market.

To explore the relationship between the importance of African studies programs and the acquisition of African imprint titles in four selected American academic libraries.

The paper examines the characteristics of the African studies programs in four universities in comparison with library holdings including the percentage of holdings from four major English‐language African publishers.

The four research libraries acquire substantial numbers of African monographs in keeping with the importance of their African studies programs.

The paper provides information on four major African studies programs and the library holdings that support them.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the recent changes in the role played by Africa as a traditional natural resources supplier for the world economy in a multipolar context. We highlight, on the one hand, how Africa remains a prominent supplier of critical minerals needed for information and communication technologies (ICT), including platinum, vanadium, coltan, chromium, manganese, zirconium, etc., and how the boomerang effect results in Africa also importing electronic waste. On the other hand, we show how the BRICS’ growth model, based on a very intensive use of natural resources acquired through international trade, is now being fuelled by Africa too. BRICS countries (especially China and India) are making foreign direct investments in Africa using their state companies to ensure the supply of natural resources under favourable economic terms. Thus, Africa appears as a disputed territory between the old domination of the advanced capitalist countries and emerging powers like the BRICS. However, this should not mask the fact that the European Union and North America are still the dominant foreign powers in the continent. Finally, we discuss which scenarios are open to further this multipolar moment, particularly in the wake of the great crisis.

This paper deals with current efforts to control the amorphous range of newsprint ephemeral documents that have dominated the Nigerian literary market for nearly thirty years. The materials which are of inestimable value to social scientists, administrators, politicians, historians, the military and commerce, originate from a variety of sources. Some of the major sources are identified and the lack of any conscious and adequate attempts by their producers to bibliographically control these publications are hereby examined in relation to the special responsibilities of the National Library of Nigeria in the production of a comprehensive national bibliography.

Since the attainment of fully fledged democracy in 1994, South Africa witnessed a substantial increase in both the number and the value of completed mergers and acquisitions (M&As) targeting South African firms. In spite of this development, studies on foreign direct investment (FDI) on South Africa have not looked at determinants of entry-mode choice of FDI such as M&A. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature by investigating locational factors that make South Africa an attractive destination for M&A activity in Africa.

The authors analyse both the number and the value of M&As, the dependent variable. They analyse the number of firms acquired each quarter in South Africa from 1991 to 2014 using a count model – the negative binomial model. They then compare the results for this model with those of benchmark models such as the normal count and the Poisson count models. In this paper, the authors test for stationarity of the time series using the Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) and the Kwiatkowski–Phillips–Schmidt–Shin (KPSS) tests. They examine the long-run relationship between the value of M&As and the selected macroeconomic variables using Johansen’s co-integration technique.

This paper finds that both the number and the value of M&As in South Africa are positively influenced by the performance of the Johannesburg Securities Exchange during the period 1991 to 2014. This result confirmed the expectations hypothesis that stock markets facilitate M&A activity. The authors also observed that other financial and macroeconomic variables – exchange rate volatility, relative inflation rate and economic growth – are important locational factors for M&A activity. Among these factors, the exchange rate volatility exerts the greatest influence on M&As. The rate of growth of gross domestic product (GDP) matters for M&A activity in emerging market economies such as South Africa.

The data for the number of M&As are more complete than that of values. This is because some firms choose not to report the value of deals after a transaction takes place, resulting in missing data for the value of M&A deals.

This paper shows the important role played by pull factors on the direction of capital flows in the long run. It is recommended that policy-makers should further strengthen and improve the efficiency of domestic financial markets. Stable and reliable monetary policy framework that maintains low levels of inflation and mitigates the volatility of exchange rate is important for FDI and M&A flows to emerging market economies. There is a need to put the necessary measures in place to improve South Africa's economic growth rate, which has been weak since the global financial crisis of 2008.

Most academic literature has examined determinants of aggregate FDI without consideration of entry-mode choice. This paper focused on the M&A entry-mode for an emerging market economy. The authors show that equity markets play a key role in facilitating M&A activity. The expectations hypothesis by Nelson (1959) that stock markets facilitate M&A activity is confirmed in this way for South Africa.