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Since the start of seed and other market reforms in the 1990s, the annual number of improved varietal releases for maize in Kenya has increased substantially. Prior to the reforms, private firms were restricted in introducing new varieties, could not protect their intellectual property and farmers had to rely exclusively on improved seeds developed and marketed by the public sector. Reforms have resulted in not only private firms entering the market and releasing improved varieties, but also an increase in varietal releases by the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the key policy reforms related to maize in Kenya, and their impacts on varietal development and yields.

The authors estimate a yield model that relates national maize yields to a number of input policy variables. The authors employ a two-stage least square regression, as one of the explanatory variables – the number of varietal releases – is likely endogenous with yield. The authors use policy variables such as public R&D, the number of plant breeder’s rights issued, and the years since private varieties have been introduced as instrument variables to estimate their influence new varietal releases directly, and then new varieties, inputs and other policies to measure their impact on yields.

The results show that policy changes such as the introduction of intellectual property rights had an important impact on the number of improved maize varieties released. However, the outcomes of the policy change such as the number of varieties and the share of area under improved varieties has no impact on increasing maize yields. The authors argue that this is because farmers continue to use older improved varieties because of the dominance of a parastatal in the maize, seed market and that newer improved varieties may not have the assumed yield advantage. Future policy and programs should be directed toward increasing the adoption of improved varieties rather than simply releasing them.

This paper provides evidence that while policy change may lead to new varietal development and release, its aggregate productivity impacts may be limited without additional reforms and intervention.

An extended period of economic growth along with stubborn childhood stunting and wasting levels raises questions about how consumer food purchasing behaviors respond to income increases in Rwanda. The purpose of this paper is to assess the role income, prices, policy, agricultural production, and market access play on how rural households purchase different food groups.

Six separate log-normal double hurdle models are run on six different food groups to examine what affects the probability a household purchases in each food group and for those who do purchase, what determines the quantity purchased.

Rural Rwandans are price and expenditure responsive but prices have more impact on food group purchases. Crop production resulted in reduced household market procurement for its associated food group but had mixed effects on the purchases of all other food groups. Rural Rwandans purchase and consume low amounts of animal-based proteins which may be a leading factor related to the high stunting and wasting rates. Owning an animal increased the purchased quantity of meat but lowered the purchased quantity of most other food groups.

Results suggest that policies and programs have to address multiple constraints simultaneously to increase the purchases of the limited food groups in the rural household diets that may be contributing to the high rates of stunting and wasting.

This study is the first to evaluate the interplay among prices, household income, household production, policies and donor programs, and demographic variables on rural Rwandan household food purchases.

This paper examines the profitability and performance measurement of U.S. regional banks during the period 1994–2011, using the GMM estimator technique. Our study extends prior research by including several factors not previously considered using U.S. data.

We use bank-specific, industry-specific, and macroeconomic determinants of profitability contemporaneous with our performance indicators. We follow the accounting fundamental analysis path in explaining the bank performance.

Among the performance measures, the efficiency ratio and provisions for credit losses are negatively and equity scaled by assets is positively related to profitability. However, these relationships either reverse (efficiency ratio and provisions for credit losses) or become insignificant (equity scaled by assets) when the target becomes change in profitability. The level of nonperforming assets is negatively related to profitability across all measures of profitability used. Macroeconomic variables are largely unrelated to profitability during the year they are measured. However, they have a significant relationship with earnings change measures, suggesting they have a lagged effect on profitability. The slope of the yield curve is especially strong in this regard.

We use our determinants to model changes in bank profitability one year ahead, in addition to including several factors not previously considered, using the predictive focus of the fundamental analysis research.

One of the central themes of education for all (EFA) for the last two decades has been empowerment through access to education. The history of EFA, however, can at best be termed as checkered. EFA has been relatively successful in drawing world attention and improving access to education. However, the question whether world attention and improved access has resulted in empowerment of people in the developing world still remains unanswered.

In this paper we argue that the limited success of EFA can best be examined and analyzed by paying close attention to tension between demands of the global capital and labor market place and nationalist agendas of the developing (post-colonial) state. These tensions affect the EFA agenda in the developing countries in complex ways.

Taking empirical-educational data from Pakistan we demonstrate that demands of the global capital and the labor market had resulted in an increased attention on institutions and programs of study that cater to the needs of the global capital and labor pool. Access to these institutions is limited to certain strata of the society. On the other hand the mass education program in Pakistan is largely defined by the nationalistic agenda of the post-colonial undemocratic state. A net impact of the interplay of these global and national dynamics is that not only the EFA's aim of mass education is hampered but also more importantly education in its present state is not empowering the recipients.

The modern day has seen an increase in the prevalence of the improvement of high-performance thermal systems for the enhancement of heat transmission. Numerous studies and research projects have been carried out to acquire an understanding of heat transport performance for their functional application to heat conveyance augmentation. The idea of this study is to inspect the entropy production in Darcy-Forchheimer Ree-Eyring nanofluid containing bioconvection flow toward a stretching surface is the topic of discussion in this paper. It is also important to take into account the influence of gravitational forces, double stratification, heat source–sink and thermal radiation. In light of the second rule of thermodynamics, a model of the generation of total entropy is presented.

Incorporating boundary layer assumptions allows one to derive the governing system of partial differential equations. The dimensional flow model is transformed into a non-dimensional representation by applying the appropriate transformations. To deal with dimensionless flow expressions, the built-in shooting method and the BVP4c code in the Matlab software are used. Graphical analysis is performed on the data to investigate the variation in velocity, temperature, concentration, motile microorganisms, Bejan number and entropy production concerning the involved parameters.

The authors have analytically assessed the impact of Darcy Forchheimer's flow of nanofluid due to a spinning disc with slip conditions and microorganisms. The modeled equations are reset into the non-dimensional form of ordinary differential equations. Which are further solved through the BVP4c approach. The results are presented in the form of tables and figures for velocity, mass, energy and motile microbe profiles. The key conclusions are: The rate of skin friction incessantly reduces with the variation of the Weissenberg number, porosity parameter and Forchheimer number. The rising values of the Prandtl number reduce the energy transmission rate while accelerating the mass transfer rate. Similarly, the effect of Nb (Brownian motion) enhances the energy and mass transfer rates. The rate of augments with the flourishing values of bioconvection Lewis and Peclet number. The factor of concentration of microorganisms is reported to have a diminishing effect on the profile. The velocity, energy and entropy generation enhance with the rising values of the Weissenberg number.

According to the findings of the study, a slip flow of Ree-Eyring nanofluid was observed in the presence of entropy production and heat sources/sinks. There are features when the implementations of Darcy–Forchheimer come into play. In addition to that, double stratification with chemical reaction characteristics is presented as a new feature. The flow was caused by the stretching sheet. It has been brought to people's attention that although there are some investigations accessible on the flow of Ree-Eyring nanofluid with double stratification, they are not presented. This research draws attention to a previously unexplored topic and demonstrates a successful attempt to construct a model with distinctive characteristics.

This paper seeks to provide empirical insight into how industrialization and technology affect environmental quality in Ghana.

Using Ecological Footprint (ECF) as a measure of environmental degradation, the authors employ annual data from World Development Indicators of the World Bank and the Global Footprint Network spanning from 1970 to 2017 and apply the fully modified least squares (FMOLS) technique.

The results reveal that industrialization has a negative significant influence on ECF, suggesting that industrialization contributes to environmental sustainability in Ghana. The authors find that technology is harmful to the environment as it has a positive significant effect on ECF. The study also documents that while education and financial development improve environmental sustainability, fossil fuel consumption exacerbates environmental degradation in Ghana.

The environmental impact of industrialization is still being debated, with very scanty empirical evidence in the African context. Based on a detailed review of the literature, this paper provides an initial attempt to investigate the industrialization–environmental sustainability nexus in Ghana. Besides, whereas most extant studies have employed CO₂ emission as a proxy of environmental degradation, the authors use ECF to gauge the level of environmental degradation which is regarded as a more inclusive metric.

In the modern business world, the main focus of the organizations is to improve the quality of the products and minimize the wastage of raw material. Keeping in view the green theory and improve the efficiency of the organization, the focus of the current study is to investigate the relationship between total quality management (TQM) and green innovation (GI), and examine how TQM practices can facilitate firms to achieve GI objectives. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is also an important factor for organizations, and this study also focuses on the mediating role of CSR between the relationship of TQM and GI.

This is an empirical study. Data were gathered from the top management of 355 SMEs working in Pakistan through a questionnaire survey; the PLS-SEM approach was used to analyse the data.

Results of the study show that TQM has significant impacts on two aspects of GI namely green product innovation and green process innovation. Moreover, results also reveal that CSR partially mediates the relationship between TQM and GI.

This study is limited to manufacturing SMEs and future research should test this model on non-manufacturing sector too. The findings of the study provide significant roadmap to the management of small and medium-sized manufacturing firms that how they can reduce wastage and improve the product and process innovation in their organizations through TQM and CSR.

This study contributes to bridging research gaps in the literature and advances how TQM, directly and indirectly, help firms improve green innovation via mediating roles of CSR.

This study aims to identify the publication phase, performance and scientific contributions of research papers related to enterprise risk management (ERM) and to visualise the emerging themes in addressing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).

The biblioshiny technique based on the bibliometrix R package was used to draw journal papers’ performance and scientific contributions by displaying distinctive features from the bibliometric method used in prior studies. The data was extracted from the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases.

Since the 1990s, ERM publication has gained momentum, and it is generally categorised into four main themes. Studies by Miller (1992) and Bromiley et al. (2015) scored the highest in global and local citations, respectively. However, the Economic Outlook ranked first in quality of publications while the Journal of Risk and Insurance topped in quantity of publications. Collaborative research mainly exists between two authors, and the dynamic number of collaborative networks is evident in the USA.

This study is limited by the filtered keywords used to generate the search on journal papers’ in WOS and Scopus. It is imperative to have more comprehensive and rigorous analytics on ERM research to enable a direction for future research. Finally, ERM implementation better equips firms to mitigate risk in a VUCA environment.

This study attempts to fill a vacuum of ERM literature, specifically in business economics, in addressing VUCA. Moreover, it covers a comprehensive predetermined period of from its inception in 1983 until 2022.

In view of organizational inertia, with the occurrence of a major event, though resource rigidity minimizes, however simultaneously, it increases process rigidity, which creates difficulties in motivating managers and dealing with the agency problem. Therefore, keeping in mind the high demand created by the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and Naya Pakistan Housing Scheme in the cement sector of Pakistan, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate governance (CG) on the cost of equity (COE) in the cement sector, to deal with the problems surging during and after the completion of these projects and highlight further opportunities for the cement sector of Pakistan.

CG is a qualitative concept therefore, eight proxies have been used to measure it along with the two control variables. This study uses balance panel data of six years from 2012 to 2017, collected from 18 companies of the cement sector of Pakistan. Descriptive statistics have been used to describe the data, correlation matrix to see the nature of the relationship, and Pooled OLS as the estimation technique, while to analyze the data a statistical package 13 has been used. To measure the COE, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has been used.

Regression results suggest that block ownership, insider ownership and the board size are insignificant, while CEO tenure is negatively and significantly associated with the COE. Non-executive directors, independence and CEO duality are insignificant; however, diversity is positively and significantly associated with the COE. Moreover, the mean value of the COE is 8.22 percent for the cement sector, while the coefficient of determination of the model under study is 74 percent.

This paper is based on the data from the cement sector of Pakistan only. Therefore, this is the reason that these results cannot be generalized on the whole economy of Pakistan.

This study helps in finding out the COE value specific to the cement sector, which will help this sector to evaluate the capital budgeting decision more precisely and accurately than before. Moreover, the association of diversity as positive, while independence as negative with the COE highlights a room for improvement in the implementation of CG codes by SECP. This study also helps to mitigate the impact of inertia, the after-effects of high demand, and managing the agency problem in the cement sector.

This is the first study using CG data collected just after the revised promulgation of CG codes in 2012, along with a wide range of eight proxies measuring CG and its impact on the COE in the cement sector.