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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact corporate governance, measured by a governance index, on the performance of listed firms in a developing economy, Ghana. It also evaluates the effect of the introduction of a code of corporate governance on compliance rates across Ghanaian firms as well as assessing the impact of the code’s introduction on firm performance for the study period 2000-2009.

The paper develops a Ghanaian corporate governance index (GCGI) containing 33 provisions to measure corporate governance quality during the pre-code and the post-code sub-periods. The authors use a panel data analytical framework and fixed effects regressions to analyse the governance-performance relationships.

After controlling for endogeneity, the authors find a statistically significant and positive relationship between the GCGI and firm performance. The analysis shows evidence of a statistically significant increase in the degree of compliance with the Ghanaian Code from the pre-2003 sub-period to the post-2003 sub-period. The authors also find that the introduction of the code has led to improved firm performance. However, not all elements of corporate governance appear to have a significant effect on firm performance.

One limitation of this study is the development of a corporate governance index. The binary coding used to construct the GCGI may not reflect the relative importance of the different corporate governance provisions. This means that all elements included in the index are given equal weighting. Future research may assign weights to each of the corporate governance provisions but this may have the disadvantage of making subjective judgements relative to the importance of each corporate governance provision recommended by the Ghanaian Code.

These results have important implications for both policy makers and companies. For policy makers, it is encouraging for the development of a code of corporate governance to regulate firms rather than enforcing rigid laws that may not be value relevant. For companies, the improvement in compliance with a code of corporate governance can provide a means of achieving improved performance.

This paper adds to the limited evidence on the governance-performance relationship in developing economies and in particular it analyses the role of a governance index. It is also the first paper to compare the pre- and the post-code governance index-performance relationship in an African or developing country.

This study aims to identify the main research development on board diversity and offers a quantitative synopsis of key themes and contributors, knowledge gaps and provides directions for further work.

Using a bibliometric analysis, the authors assess the patterns in global board diversity research based on co-occurrences of researchers’ keywords and publication outputs of 991 articles from the Scopus database. Also, the co-citation network analysis was performed to assess the intellectual structure of board diversity research.

According to the keyword analysis, the authors found that researchers focus on the gender diversity of the boardroom while ignoring the cognitive diversity and other aspects of demographic diversity such as educational, ethnic, age, nationality, experience, background and tenure, pointing to the need for further work to consider other diversity attributes and the interaction between them. Additionally, board diversity research related to (but not limited to) payout policy, cash holding, initial public offerings, small–medium enterprises and financial institutions is limited.

This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the development of board diversity research (using a large archival database) and identifies the common construct as well as the potential opportunities for future research directions.

Drawing on both the stakeholder theory and Carroll’s Corporate Social Responsibility Pyramid, this chapter explores sustainability practice challenges of a gold minning multinational enterprise in Ghana. Primary data was collected through observation and the interviewing of multi-stakeholder groups. We found that internal stakeholders perceive sustainability expenditure as costly. However, while employees of the case enterprise see the cost as depleting shareholders’ wealth, managers view them as investment with possible long-term benefits. Meanwhile, the external stakeholders perceive the gold mining enterprise’s sustainability expenditure as meagre and that beneficiary communities are not economically empowered to sustain those investments. Again, we found that government’s inability to clamp down illegal gold mining threatens economic and environmental sustainability. Additionally, members of the host community identify the lack of adequate employment opportunities within the entity as a hindrance to their economic empowerment. We submit that the resolution of the sustainability challenges would contribute to the balancing of stakeholders’ expectations: the conduct of ethical business through compliance to environmental laws; promotion of host communities’ social well-being; and improved economic returns for shareholders. By meeting the needs of stakeholders, gold mining enterprises could gain acceptance in their host communities and boost corporate reputation.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the discourse on livelihood access and challenges of fisherfolks and farmers within coastal communities in Ghana. Insights from such studies can help to create win-win outcomes between communities and oil companies and give the latter social license to operate. Also, it will help to identify the existing knowledge gaps that still need to be filled and contribute to the overall management of Ghana’s oil resources. It will further contribute to the government’s livelihood diversification programs in oil-producing communities.

The study employed the use of qualitative research paradigm to collect primary data in oil- and gas-producing communities in the Western Region of Ghana. Specifically, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews were conducted among diverse stakeholders.

Findings from the study show that several people and households along the coast of Ghana’s Western Region depend on the fishing industry as their livelihoods. However, fisherfolks are facing several challenges due to oil production. For instance, the quantity of fish harvest has reduced drastically since oil production started in 2010. Farming activities have also been adversely affected. The study has unearthed that the existing social and economic infrastructure are very limited to support the development of the coastal communities in Ghana’s Western Region. The study suggests that to deal with some of the challenges faced by coastal communities, livelihood diversification programs should be introduced.

Not every community within the oil and gas areas in the Western Region was covered. Future work will address this limitation.

The study has revealed that the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies need to expedite the process of conducting a comprehensive needs assessment of communities and capture them in their medium-term development plans.

The corporate social responsibility programs will create win-win outcomes between oil companies and communities.

The study is an original piece of work with data collected from the field. The study will contribute to the efficient management of natural resources in Ghana and other developing countries.

Although the global construction industry has made great contributions to economic development, industry corruption is a challenge for governments all over the world. This paper aims to investigate the causal complexity of organizational corruption by exploring the configuration effect of multiple induced conditions of corruption in the construction sector.

This study is focused on bribery, a specific form of corrupt behavior through a scenario-based survey role-playing game in which participants encounter bribery. A total of 400 Chinese construction sector participants were randomly recruited to complete this survey.

Compared with studies that have identified a number of factors associated with corruption in the construction sector, this study found asymmetry and complexity in the causality of organizational corruption. That is, when a variable causing corruption changes from one condition to its opposite – for example, from fierce to mild competition – the degree of corruption is not necessarily reduced as one may expect.

Anti-corruption measures should not rely solely on the net effects of discrete conditions and the interactions between multiple factors should not be ignored. In other words, anti-corruption strategies should not be implemented in isolation of their context, and pairing control measures with configurations is critical in controlling corruption. Finally, multiple configuration paths should be reconsidered when considering the degree of corruption reduction.

This study proposes a comprehensive analysis framework for addressing organizational corruption in the construction sector by investigating configuration effects of multiple induced conditions and offers a useful method for addressing corruption.

Corruption continues to be a pervasive stain on the construction industry in developing countries worldwide, jeopardising project performance and with wide-ranging negative implications for all facets of society. As such, this study aims to identify and analyse the causes of corruption in the construction sector of an emerging economy such as Malaysia, as it is crucial to uncover the specific facilitating factors involved to devise effective counter strategies.

Following a detailed literature review, 18 causes of corruption are identified. The results of an opinion survey within the Malaysian construction industry are further reported to rank and analyse the causes. The factor analysis technique is then applied to uncover the principal factors involved.

The results indicate that all the considered causes are perceived to be significant, with the most critical causes being avarice, relationships between parties, lack of ethical standards, an intense competitive nature and the involvement of a large amount of money. A factor analysis reveals four major causal dimensions of these causes, comprising the unique nature of the construction industry and the extensive competition involved; unscrupulous leadership, culture and corruption perception; a flawed legal system and lack of accountability; and ineffective enforcement and an inefficient official bureaucracy.

The study presents the Malaysian construction industry’s view of the causes of corruption. Therefore, the arguments made in the study are influenced by the social, economic and cultural settings of Malaysia, which may limit generalisation of the findings.

This paper helps stakeholders understand the root causes and underlying dimensions of corruption in the construction industry, especially in Malaysia. Recommendations for changing cultures that may be conducive to corrupt practices, and anti-corruption measures, are suggested based on the findings of the research.

These findings can guide practitioners and researchers in addressing the impediments that give rise to the vulnerability of the construction industry to corrupt practices and understanding the “red flags” in project delivery.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact that financial sector reforms have on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Ghana.

Composite financial sector reform index was constructed, which was made up of various forms of reform policies that were implemented from 1987 to 2016. The auto regressive distributed lag bounds test was used to establish cointegration between variables. Having controlled for other covariates that affect FDI such as trade openness, exchange rate, gross domestic product per capita, inflation and by using the fully modified ordinary least squares method, the estimations are robust as it uses a semi-parametric correction to avoid for any possible issues of endogeneity and serial correlation.

Results from the paper reveal that financial sector reform deepening boost FDI with a 2.167% increase in FDI following from a unit percentage improvement of the financial sector reforms. Considering the various categories of reforms, the results reveal that competitive reforms have the highest impact on FDI followed by privatization reforms with positive and significant elasticity coefficients of 2.174% and 0.726%, respectively. Behavioral reforms revealed a positive effect on FDI, albeit insignificant.

The paper contributes to policy by providing empirical evidence on the effect of financial sector reform on FDI inflows in Ghana. As far as the review of literature is concerned, this paper provides the foremost empirical evidence on the subject with sole emphasis on Ghana. Thus, this paper suggests the deepening of the financial sector reforms, improving competition and maintaining macroeconomic stability.

Notwithstanding that numerous studies have focused on strategy in quantity surveying (QS) professional service firms, there is a paucity of investigation on the segmentation of QS professional services. The purpose of this study is to investigate the segmentation of QS services for diversification and a focus strategy formation.

This study adopts the positivist stance and quantitative approach in which a simple random sampling technique was used to select participants. In total, 110 survey questionnaires were administered to registered professional QS, out of which 79 completed questionnaires were returned for analysis.

The paper identifies three main QS service segments characterised by low, moderate and high competition. In addition, this study found that the concentration of traditional QS services in the building construction sector is due to the unwillingness of QS professional service firms to diversify into the non-construction sectors such as oil and gas. The diversification of QS services in the low competitive segment requires the adoption of agile approaches.

The study was limited to numeric analyses and so would be complemented by qualitative research in the future.

This paper is useful to QS professional service firms interested in diversifying their services into the non-construction sectors to enhance the pricing of their services.

Segmentation of QS services is fundamental to the formulation of focus strategy for non-construction sectors such as oil and gas and mining to enhance the pricing of QS professional services.

This paper aims to examine the cross-quantile correlation and causality-in-quantiles between green investments and energy commodities during the outbreak of COVID-19. To be specific, the authors aim to address the following questions: Is there any distributional predictability among green bonds and energy commodities during COVID-19? Is there exist any directional predictability between green investments and energy commodities during the global pandemic? Can green bonds hedge the risk of energy commodities during a period of the financial crisis.

The authors use the nonparametric causality in quantile and cross-quantilogram (CQ) correlation approaches as the estimation techniques to investigate the distributional and directional predictability between green investments and energy commodities respectively using daily spot prices from January 1, 2020, to March 26, 2021. The study uses daily closing price indices S&P Green Bond Index as a representative of the green bond market. In the case of energy commodities, the authors use S&P GSCI Natural Gas Spot, S&P GSCI Biofuel Spot, S&P GSCI Unleaded Gasoline Spot, S&P GSCI Gas Oil Spot, S&P GSCI Brent Crude Spot, S&P GSCI WTI, OPEC Oil Basket Price, Crude Oil Oman, Crude Oil Dubai Cash, S&P GSCI Heating Oil Spot, S&P Global Clean Energy, US Gulf Coast Kerosene and Los Angeles Low Sulfur CARB Diesel Spot.

From the CQ correlation results, there exists an overall negative directional predictability between green bonds and natural gas. The authors find that the directional predictability between green bonds and S&P GSCI Biofuel Spot, S&P GSCI Gas Oil Spot, S&P GSCI Brent Crude Spot, S&P GSCI WTI Spot, OPEC Oil Basket Spot, Crude Oil Oman Spot, Crude Oil Dubai Cash Spot, S&P GSCI Heating Oil Spot, US Gulf Coast Kerosene-Type Jet Fuel Spot Price and Los Angeles Low Sulfur CARB Diesel Spot Price is negative during normal market conditions and positive during extreme market conditions. Results from the non-parametric causality in the quantile approach show strong evidence of asymmetry in causality across quantiles and strong variations across markets.

The quantile time-varying dependence and predictability results documented in this paper can help market participants with different investment targets and horizons adopt better hedging strategies and portfolio diversification to aid optimal policy measures during volatile market conditions.

The outcome of this study will promote awareness regarding the environment and also increase investor’s participation in the green bond market. Further, it allows corporate institutions to fulfill their social commitment through the issuance of green bonds.

This paper differs from these previous studies in several aspects. First, the authors have included a wide range of energy commodities, comprising three green bond indices and 14 energy commodity indices. Second, the authors have explored the dependency between the two markets, particularly during COVID-19 pandemic. Third, the authors have applied CQ and causality-in-quantile methods on the given data set. Since the market of green and sustainable finance is growing drastically and the world is transmitting toward environment-friendly practices, it is essential and vital to understand the impact of green bonds on other financial markets. In this regard, the study contributes to the literature by documenting an in-depth connectedness between green bonds and crude oil, natural gas, petrol, kerosene, diesel, crude, heating oil, biofuels and other energy commodities.

This research aims to investigate and identify knowledge transfer (KT) enablers within the developing country of Ghana. These enablers act as mechanisms to stimulate knowledge creation, knowledge protection and build effective knowledge-sharing (KS) behaviour in construction companies – consequently, they are crucial to business survival in a globally competitive market.

A perception questionnaire survey was used to elicit responses from construction practitioners using purposive and snowballing non-probability sampling techniques. Summary statistical analysis and a chi-square test was used to uncover relationships between the independent and dependent variables.

An empirical examination of data collected indicated that knowledge strategy, organizational culture, information technology and knowledge leadership as knowledge enablers have a significant positive relationship with KT. Future research is however required to measure transfer within an organization vis-à-vis measure perception of such.

The work presents a rare glimpse of the relationship between knowledge enablers and KT (particularly in a developing country context) and as such provides utility to policymakers and construction firms to enhance their knowledge capabilities.