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The Covid-19 pandemic has rekindled interest in sovereign debt crises amidst calls for debt relief for developing and emerging countries. But has debt relief lessened the debt burdens of emerging and developing economies? The purpose of this paper is to empirically address this question. In particular, the focus is on the implications of debt relief and institutional qualities for sovereign debt in emerging and developing economies.

The model extends the framework on the probability of default by incorporating the receipt of debt relief by a debtor country. Doing so allows to better explain movements of sovereign defaults relating to debt relief. The model is estimated via the regular probit regression.

The analysis shows that the debt relief provided, thus, far, failed to ease the debt overhang problems of developing and emerging countries and reduced investment. The current debt relief schemes may underscore the prospects of self-enforcing and self-fulfilling sovereign debt crises rather than eliminating the dilemma completely. Regarding the forms of debt relief, the analysis shows that debt forgiveness offers favourable prospects in terms of debt sustainability and economic outcomes than debt rescheduling. Perhaps, the sovereign debt crises, particularly in low-income countries, hinge on insolvency problems rather than transitory illiquidity issues.

Any debt relief mechanism should consider seriously the potential incentive effect that reinforces expectations of future debt-relief initiatives. Importantly, solving the sovereign debt problem requires a programme for sustained investment and economic growth, while not discounting the critical role of prudent debt management policies and institutions.

This study contributes a different angle to the debate on sovereign debt distress. Aside from the structural and economic factors, this study investigates the role of debt management policy in the debtor nation and the implications of debt relief benefits for sovereign risk. The framework also focuses on whether the different forms of debt relief exert distinctive impacts.

This paper aims to investigate how the extant literature on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) empirically explores the perspective of emerging economy suppliers operating in global supply chains (GSCs). It thereby explains the role of emerging economy suppliers in determining the success of SSCM.

A systematic literature review of 41 empirical papers (published between 2007 and 2021) was conducted, involving both descriptive and thematic analyses.

The findings demonstrate that emerging economy suppliers have a key role in SSCM, given their use of positive feedback loops to proactively create remedies to surpass barriers using their collaboration mechanisms, and exploit authentic sustainability outcomes as reinforcements to drive further sustainability initiatives. The authors also demonstrate that suppliers are particularly focused on the cultural and institutional dimensions of sustainability. Finally, the authors provide an explanatory analytical framework to reduce the institutional distance between buyers and their global suppliers.

This review identifies avenues for future research on the role of emerging economy suppliers in SSCM.

Recognising remedies to surpass barriers and reinforcements to drive new actions can aid SSCM in GSCs and improve understanding between buyers and suppliers.

The valorisation of cultural and institutional issues can lead to more responsible supplier interactions and improved sustainability outcomes in emerging economies.

This review only analyses the viewpoint of emerging economy suppliers, whereas prior SSCM reviews have focused on the buyer perspective. Thus, the authors reduce supplier invisibility and institutional distance between GSC participants.

This study introduces a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the foreign direct investment (FDI) literature by multinational corporations (MNCs) focusing on emerging economies to identify the most influential authors, journals and articles in FDI research and reveals the fields' conceptual and intellectual structures. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The study analyzed 533 articles published between 1974 and 2020 in 226 academic journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. We used the R language for statistical computing to map author collaboration, co-word and develop a conceptual and intellectual map of the field.

The results show that, although the FDI literature has many authors, few dominate the field. The International Business Review (IBR) and International Journal of Emerging Markets (IJoEM) are the main sources of the publications. Moreover, bibliometric laws show that our dataset follows the Lotka law of scientific productivity and Bradford law of scattering, identifying the core journals. Finally, FDI by MNCs in emerging economies research is divided into four sub-research themes related to (1) FDI determinants, (2) entry mode, (3) MNCs and FDI performance and (4) the internationalization process.

The current article provides several starting points for practitioners and researchers investigating FDI. It contributes to broadening the vision of the field and offers recommendations for future studies.

Background: Amid increasing leadership failures in the global business context, the mining industry is one of the industries with many adverse incidents, affecting employee safety, the environment, and surrounding communities. Emerging economies tend to have unique socio-economic challenges and greater relative economic dependence on mining, presenting unique challenges to leaders. The purpose of this research was to study the realities of responsible leadership in the mining industry in an emerging economy.

Methods: A qualitative research study, consisting of semi-structured interviews was conducted. Nine senior mine managers were selected to represent perspectives from different operations and mining houses. Data was gathered from August to October 2020 in South Africa, an emerging economy with significant mining operations. A thematic analysis of interview transcripts was conducted through the use of software, rendering five themes, with 12 sub-themes.

Results: The research found that requirements on mining leaders in emerging economies demand consistent balancing of a complex set of competing risks, whilst attending to paradoxical requirements among operations, and internal and external stakeholders. Leaders face several competing requirements from stakeholders, the environment, mining practices, and time frames. Responsible leaders must navigate a paradoxical maze of needs and time horizons, with several conflicting forces and dilemmas, and dichotomous relationships. Responsible leadership in the mining industry of an emerging economy is a proverbial minefield of paradoxes and dilemmas between responsible intentions and practical realities. These paradoxes and dilemmas are specifically acute in the context of emerging economies due to the dire socio-economic situations. A total of 10 competencies emerged as essential responsible leadership requirements in this context.

Conclusions: The study provides an in-depth understanding of the intricacies of responsible leadership in the mining industry of an emerging economy. This understanding will contribute to capacitating leaders in the mining industries of emerging economies to act responsibly.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) of emerging market firms (EMFs) and provide direction for future research on the topic.

The authors specifically review the recent literature between the years 2000 and 2019 on CE with the keywords “corporate entrepreneurship,” “emerging economies” and “emerging countries” published in the Australian Business Deans Council list journals. The authors review the existing literature about CE in emerging markets, summarize current achievements and present an agenda for future research.

Based on the review, the authors categorized the macro and micro contexts of CE and summarized the current articles on CE in emerging markets within each macro and micro context. The authors conclude that despite the abundance of research on CE that investigates the three prongs of CE in terms of innovation, strategic renewal and new venturing in developed market contexts, there is a scarcity of literature that focuses on CE in emerging markets from a holistic perspective.

While there is an abundance of literature review on CE in general in terms of the drivers of the construct, the contexts contributing to it and the outcomes, the reviews are lacking about CE specifically within the context of emerging markets. Emerging markets vary from developed markets institutionally, economically, culturally, socially and technologically. However, the questions of how these differences impact the CE activities, as it relates to innovation, venturing and strategic renewal in EMFs, and how these differences provide incentives or hinder the activities that contribute to CE remain mostly unanswered. This paper reviewed the research on CE and emerging market contexts from 2000 to present. It targets to provide a better understanding of the current achievement on this topic and what to be done in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the changing pattern and characteristics of international financial flows in the emerging entrepreneurial ecosystems of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), provide a novel taxonomy to classify and analyze them, and discuss how such investments contribute to competence building and sustainable development.

In an exploratory study, the authors analyze the characteristics of international venture capital investors and the start-ups receiving funding in Kenya and map their interaction. The authors proceed by developing a novel taxonomy, classifying investors according to their main rationales (for-profit-for-impact), and start-ups according to the locus of needs and markets addressed by the start-up (local-global) and the locus of the start-ups capacity and knowledge (local-global).

The authors observe a new type of mainly western investors who support innovative ideas in SSA by identifying and investing in domestically developed technical innovations with the potential to address global market needs. The authors find such innovations to be mainly developed at the intersect of global and local knowledge.

The authors shed light on the – up to now – under-researched emerging phenomenon of international high-tech investments in SSA, and develop a novel taxonomy of technology investments in low-income countries, guiding further research on the conditions, impact, practical, and policy implications of this new form of finance flows.

International Journal of Emerging Markets (IJoEM) is a leading journal that publishes high-quality research focused on emerging markets. In 2020, IJoEM celebrated its fifteenth anniversary, and the objective of this paper is to conduct a retrospective analysis to commensurate IJoEM's milestone.

Data used in this study were extracted using the Scopus database. Bibliometric analysis, using several indicators, is adopted to reveal the major trends and themes of a journal. Mapping of bibliographic data is carried using VOSviewer.

Study findings indicate that IJoEM has been growing for publications and citations since its inception. Four significant research directions emerged, i.e. consumer behaviour, financial markets, financial institutions and corporate governance and strategic dimensions based on cluster analysis of IJoEM's publications. The identified future research directions are focused on emergent investments opportunities, trends in behavioural finance, emerging role technology-financial companies, changing trends in corporate governance and the rising importance of strategic management in emerging markets.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of IJoEM. The study presents the key themes and trends emerging from a leading journal considered a high-quality research journal for research on emerging markets by academicians, scholars and practitioners.

Despite being a viable source of funds, African sovereign bond markets are relatively underexplored. The empirical literature fails to consider the impact of exclusively macroeconomic factors and the volatile contexts in which African markets operate. The purpose of this paper is to fill the vacuum by proposing a context-sensitive theoretical framework. The study targets, specifically, macroeconomic factors and assesses the extent to which they affect bond market development.

Using panel data on sovereign bond markets from 26 African economies, the study extends previous methodologies used in similar studies by accounting for downside risk in a generalized method of moments (GMM) framework and employing tighter robustness measures.

This study finds that inflation, domestic debt, external debt, GDP at PPP, fiscal balance and exports are important macroeconomic drivers of sovereign bond market development in African emerging economies.

While GMM estimation is beneficial in the presence of endogeneity between the dependent variables that are instrumented with lagged independent variables, it guarantees consistency but, not unbiased estimations.

Market-oriented government funding with well-defined debt management strategies must be implemented to support the development of sovereign bond markets. External debt must be set at a sustainable level, and government should be dedicated to the confirmation of this. Furthermore, inflation rates must be kept low and stable.

If policymakers are to take this study seriously, bond markets may begin to be viable sources of funds for African emerging economies.

This study introduces a methodology for measuring bond market development that considers the systemic volatility in emerging markets and proposes a theoretical framework for African emerging economies. In addition, the authors identify a new macroeconomic determinant of bond market development in the region.

Although previous research has examined the role of franchising for the economic development of countries, no empirical study to date has investigated the importance of franchising for social, infrastructural, and institutional development. The authors address this research gap by applying research results from the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and highlight that franchising has a positive impact on economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development.

This study uses a fixed-effects model on a panel dataset for 2006–2015 from 49 countries to test the hypothesis that franchising positively influences various dimensions of country development such as economic social institutional and infrastructural development.

The findings highlight that franchising has a positive impact on the economic, social, infrastructural, and institutional development of a country. Specifically, the results show that the earlier and the more franchising systems enter a country, the stronger the positive impact of franchising on the country's economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development.

This study has several limitations that provide directions for further research. First, the empirical investigation is limited by the characteristics of the data, which are composed of information from 49 countries (covering a period of 10 years). Because franchising is not recognized as a form of entrepreneurial governance in many emerging and developing countries, the available information is mainly provided by the franchise associations in the various countries. Hence, there is a need to collect additional data in each country and to include additional countries. Second, although the authors included developed and developing countries in the analysis, the authors could not differentiate between developed and developing countries when testing the hypotheses, because the database was not sufficiently complete. Third, future studies should analyze the causality issue between franchising and development more closely. The role of franchising in development may be changing depending on different unobserved country factors, economic sector characteristics, or development stages.

What are the practical implications of this study for the role of franchising in the development of emerging and developing economies? Because public policy in emerging and developing countries suffers from a lack of financial resources to improve the social, infrastructural and institutional environment, entrepreneurs, such as franchisors who expand into these countries, play an important role for these countries' development. In addition to their entrepreneurial role of exploring and exploiting profit opportunities, they are social, institutional, and political entrepreneurs who may positively influence country development (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Shepard and Patzelt, 2011). Specifically, the findings highlight that countries with an older franchise sector (more years of franchise experience) may realize first-mover advantages and hence larger positive spillover effects on their economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development than countries with a younger franchise sector. Hence, governments of emerging and developing countries have the opportunity and responsibility to reduce potential market entry barriers and provide additional incentives for franchise systems in order to trigger these positive spillover effects. The authors expect that the spillover effects from the franchise sector on the economic, institutional, social and infrastructural development of a country are stronger in emerging and developing countries than in developed countries.

Previous research has focused on the impact of franchising on the economic development of a country, such as its growth of gross domestic product (GDP), employment, business skills, innovation and technology transfer. This study extends the existing literature by going beyond the impact of franchising on economic development: the results show that franchising as an entrepreneurial activity offers opportunities for economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development, all of which are particularly important for emerging and developing economies. The findings of this study contribute to the international franchise and development economics literature by offering a better understanding of the impact of franchising on country development.

This paper investigates whether sustainability performance (SP) protects financial performance (FP) for firms in both developed and emerging economies during the COVID-19-induced economic downturn.

Using a recent sample of firms in 34 countries between 2003 and 2021, the authors employ ordinary least squares regressions, moderations and the Heckman two-step method to test the hypotheses.

Firms with strong SP have higher FP in developed and emerging economies in the upcoming year. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020–2021, the impact of sustainability on FP is pronounced in developed but not in emerging economies. Furthermore, cross-listings expose firms in emerging economies to high-standard institutional mechanisms in developed economies. Thus, sustainable firms in emerging economies cross-listed on European stock exchanges are more profitable.

For regulators and standard setters, the global-level comparative analysis helps them find solutions that may assist firms in improving SP globally (e.g. mandatory reporting) and enduring crises resiliently. For institutional investors, the study reveals the relatively different impact of sustainability risk for firms in developed and emerging economies. For practitioners and private sector firms, this study contributes to the dialogue on what makes firms more resilient in COVID-19. Although COVID-19 might be temporary, the lessons learned could protect firms from future crises.

The authors contribute to the contingency perspective between sustainability and financial performance by providing recent empirical evidence in a global setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors demonstrate how different external institutional mechanisms (rule-based governance and relation-based governance) and cross-listing affect the SP-FP relationship during a crisis. The authors extend the knowledge in crisis management literature with a comparative study and fill the research gap on how SP affects FP for firms in emerging economies compared to developed economies.