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This study aims to examine the moderating effect of media exposure and media legitimacy on the environmental audit committee (EAC) regarding environmental disclosure quality as measured by voluntary and timely disclosure.

This paper was based on a sample of 81 French nonfinancial companies listed on the SBF 120 index and covered a six-year period; from 2014 to 2019. To test the hypotheses, a feasible generalized least squares regression was applied. Moreover, the authors checked the results using an additional analysis and the generalized method of moment model for endogeneity problems.

The results obtained show that for 482 French firm-year observations during the period 2014–2019, the media exposure does not play a moderating role between the EAC and the voluntary environmental disclosure; However, it plays a moderating role between the EAC and the timely environmental disclosure. The results also show that media legitimacy plays a moderating role between the EAC and the quality of environmental information. After testing for endogeneity problems, the findings remain unchanged.

The findings of this study may be of interest to academic researchers, practitioners and regulators who are interested in determining the quality of environmental disclosure by considering the role of the EAC while giving a role to media exposure and media legitimacy in the French context. Considering the EAC as a powerful source of effective corporate governance to improve the quality of environmental disclosure for decision-making, the research provides valuable insights for policymakers and managers on the importance of this mechanism and the importance of the environmental media and its tone in making environmental reporting useful and relevant.

The originality of the work lies in the fact that it is one of the first works that deal with the moderating effect of media exposure on the relationship between the EAC and the quality of environmental information disclosure measured by voluntary and timely disclosure. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous empirical studies have been conducted on this relationship in the French context or in other contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate inflation convergence within the East African Community (EAC) as it aspires to become a currency union.

An unobserved dynamic factor model was used to decompose the variation in inflation into a component that is common across the countries in the EAC region and a component that is country specific. Convergence was measured by the percentage of variation in inflation that is common across countries.

The estimated results from the dynamic factor model for the pre‐EAC Treaty (1981:3 to 2000:2) period and post‐EAC Treaty (2000:3 to 2009:1) period suggest that the percentage variation in inflation in the EAC that is explained by the common regional component increased significantly during the post‐Treaty period.

One of the limitations of this paper is that it does not address the mechanism through which the convergence in a currency union is achieved. Future research should try to examine the link between convergence and different macroeconomic policies.

This paper suggests that the push towards forming a currency union in East Africa has led to a greater degree of inflation synchronization across different countries in the region.

The main contribution of this paper is to use an unobserved component model to estimate the degree of inflation synchronization in East African countries.

Within earned value management, the cost performance index (CPI) and the critical ratio (CR) are used to generate the estimates at completion (EACs). According to the research in the 1990s, estimating the final contract’s cost at completion (CAC) using EAC_CR is a quicker predictor of the actual final cost versus using EAC_CPI. This paper aims to investigate whether this trend stills holds for modern department of defense contracts.

Accessing the Cost Assessment Data Enterprise (CADE) database, 451 contracts consisting of 863 contract line item numbers (CLINs) were initially retrieved and analyzed in three stages. The first replicated the work conducted in 1990s. The second stage entailed calculating 95 per cent confidence intervals and hypothesis tests regarding percentage accuracy of EACs for a contract’s final CAC. Lastly, regression analysis was conducted to characterize major, moderate and minor influencers on EAC reliability.

For modern contracts, EAC_CR aligns more with EAC_CPI and no longer demonstrates early accuracy of a contract’s final CAC. Contract percentage completion strongly reduced the per cent error of estimating CAC, while cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts and those with no work breakdown structure greater than Level 2 negatively affected accuracy.

To militate against optimism of early assessment of a contract's true cost.

This paper provides empirical evidence that EAC_CR behaves more like EAC_CPI with respect to modern contracts, suggesting that today’s contracts have relatively high SPI. Therefore, caution is warranted for program managers when estimating the CAC from contract initiation up to and slightly beyond the mid-point of completion.

This case can be used in management of international business courses to illustrate the analysis of market attractiveness, the importance of fit between firm capabilities and market requirements, and the effects of multimarket competition. It describes the international expansion challenges facing EAC Nutrition, the infant formula division of a Danish conglomerate, in early 2002. Growth in EAC's core markets of Thailand and Malaysia has stagnated and EAC is contemplating three expansion options: entry into India, geographic expansion within China, and product line expansion in existing markets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of export logistics components: shipment arrangements, timely delivery, customs quality, trade infrastructure, and tracking and tracing on export competitiveness of firms in the East African Community (EAC).

The study adopted the Structural Gravity Model and the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML). PPML a nonlinear estimation method was applied in STATA on a balanced panel data for the period of 2007–2018. Data were obtained from World Bank International Trade Centre (ITC), World Bank Logistics Performance Index (LPI) and World Bank development indicators.

Results show that timely delivery and tracking and tracing of exports are positive and significant predictors of export competitiveness in EAC countries. Conversely, shipment arrangements, customs quality and trade infrastructure have no influence on export competitiveness.

The results of this study show that export logistics components of shipment arrangements, customs quality and trade infrastructure do not matter at the present in improving export competitiveness in the EAC. There is a need to examine the intricate nature of the EAC economy to further this study's findings.

The EAC partner states should embrace deep integration by removing the behind the border trade barriers in addition to other trade restrictions, to create a common economic space among member states. This will further shrink the delivery time and the tracking and tracing of exports hence improving the competitiveness of EAC exports within the region and outside. Also, common and harmonized trade policies and regulations should be implemented through mutual recognition agreements where countries agree to recognize one another's conformity assessments.

This study explains the complex dynamic interactions of export logistics factors in the EAC using quantitative data and that this interaction has an effect on the export competitiveness in import-dominated countries with less harmonization in their trade policies.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project monitoring and control technique that enables the forecasting of a project's duration. Many EVM metrics and project duration forecasting methods have been proposed. However, very few studies have compared their accuracy and stability.

This paper presents an exhaustive stability and accuracy analysis of 27 deterministic EVM project duration forecasting methods. Stability is measured via Pearson's, Spearman's and Kendall's correlation coefficients while accuracy is measured by Mean Squared and Mean Absolute Percentage Errors. These parameters are determined at ten percentile intervals to track a given project's progress across 4,100 artificial project networks with varied topologies.

Findings support that stability and accuracy are inversely correlated for most forecasting methods, and also suggest that both significantly worsen as project networks become increasingly parallel. However, the AT + PD-ESmin forecasting method stands out as being the most accurate and reliable.

Implications of this study will allow construction project managers to resort to the simplest, most accurate and most stable EVM metrics when forecasting project duration. They will also be able to anticipate how the project topology (i.e., the network of activity predecessors) and the stage of project progress can condition their accuracy and stability.

Unlike previous research comparing EVM forecasting methods, this one includes all deterministic methods (classical and recent alike) and measures their performance in accordance with several parameters. Activity durations and costs are also modelled akin to those of construction projects.

Modern renewable energy is crucial for environmental conservation, sustainable economic growth and energy security, especially in developing East African nations that heavily use traditional biomass. Thus, this study aims to examine urbanization and modern renewable energy consumption (MREC) in East African community (EAC) while controlling for gross domestic product (GDP), population growth, foreign direct investment (FDI), industrialization and trade openness (TOP).

This study considers a balanced panel of five EAC countries from 1996 to 2019. Long-run dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) and fully modified ordinary least squares estimations were used to ascertain the relationships while the vector error-correction model was used to ascertain the causal relationship.

Results show that urbanization, FDI, industrialization and TOP positively affect MREC. Whereas population growth and GDP reduce MREC, the effect for GDP is not that significant. The study also found a bidirectional causality between urbanization, FDI, TOP and MREC in the long run.

Investing in modern renewable energy facilities should be a top priority, particularly in cities with expanding populations. The governments of the EAC should endeavor to make MREC affordable among the urban population by creating income-generating activities in the urban centers and sensitizing the urban population to the benefits of using MREC. Also, the government may come up with policies that enhance the establishment of lower prices for modern renewable energy commodities so as to increase their affordability.

MREC is a new concept in the energy consumption literature. Much of the research focuses on renewable energy consumption including the use of traditional biomass which contributes to climate change negatively. Besides, the influence of factors such as urbanization has not been given significant attention. Yet urbanization is identified as a catalyst for MREC.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama continues to actively promote his party's East Asian Community (EAC), which he had as a centrepiece of his coalition government. This chapter supplements an earlier one where I compare the EAC with that of the late South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's Northeast Asian Community (NEAC) and examine the impediments that have been the cause of friction in the region, the removal of which is fundamental to the creation of these communities, and show that that they will be around for a very long time. This chapter concentrates on what the EAC can learn from the European Union experience since both Hatoyama and Roh have stated that it is the EU that has been the source of their inspiration. It argues that the basic requirements for a ‘customs union’, let alone a ‘common market’ or ‘economic community’, will not be realised by the EAC in the foreseeable future. This suggests that the best that can be hoped for is a ‘preferential trade and investment arrangement’, between China, together with Hong Kong and Taiwan, Japan, both the Koreas and the United States, otherwise one must wonder why the EAC or NEAC is needed, rather than the ASEAN+3 and ASEAN+6 that are presently in the making. The problem is that both Hatoyama and Roh have ruled out the United States as a full member while at the same time they want it to continue to provide security for the region when full membership would enhance that. Nevertheless, the vision is admirable and should be desired by the whole world, not just the parties directly involved, so should receive our full support.

The world faces a catastrophic Coronavirus (COVID-19) disease, where almost all countries have reported positive cases with a global number of more than 262 million cases and the death toll of nearly 5 million people (Johns Hopkins University, 30 November 2021). This pandemic affects not only the health sector but also other sectors, particularly the economic and cultural sectors. East African Community (EAC) and Indonesia are among the countries affected by COVID-19. The objectives of this study are to discuss the strategy employed by the EAC and the Indonesian Governments in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, the needs to be done to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and the mitigation measures to minimise the adverse outcomes of this COVID-19 disaster in their particular communities. The study’s academic survey and data were obtained from scientific literature (Ministry of Health from EAC and Indonesia), World Health Organization (WHO), mass media reports and research institutions. The results of the study show that the strategies used by East Africa Community and Indonesia to manage and mitigate the negative impacts of COVID-19 in their areas have been successful. The number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in 2021 decreased compared to 2020, and the number of recovered people is increasing. The author advises the governments of all countries to continue to educate the society on preventive and mitigation measures for the COVID-19 outbreak, ensuring that the steps for handling the spread of this pandemic are widely known by the public, and encouraging the public to take preventative measures in facing the COVID-19 outbreak.

This study aims to examine the effect of governance on the consumption of modern renewable energy in the East African Community (EAC), controlling for economic growth, trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI).

The study relied on secondary data sourced from the World Development Indicators, World Governance Indicators and the International Energy Agency (IEA) for the EAC from 1996 to 2019. A panel Cross-Sectional Augmented Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) model and second-generation panel data models were employed in the analysis.

The findings indicate that poor governance and inadequate FDI are significantly responsible for the low level of modern renewable energy consumption (MREC) in the EAC. On the other hand, trade openness significantly enhances MREC, while GDP per capita has no significant effect on MREC.

The consumption of modern renewable energy sources (excluding the traditional use of biomass) and its determinants, as most studies focus on renewable energy consumption as a whole. The study also employed the panel CS-ARDL model and second-generation panel data models.