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Research on financial inclusion (FI) in Islamic countries has evolved and gained prominence. This study aims to construct an extensive multidimensional FI index to ascertain the level of inclusion and trends in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) countries. Additionally, this study examines the potential role of Islamic finance in improving access to financial services.

Data for the study were collected from databases covering MENA countries for the period 2010–2020. An inclusion index has been constructed using the entropy method.

Key findings indicate that the overall FI has improved in Islamic countries. However, it should be noted that all MENA countries fall within the low or medium levels of the inclusion index. It was observed that insurance access and penetration savings were poor in the Islamic MENA countries.

The authors recommend that policymakers focus on insurance access and saving behaviour in their respective countries. Based upon these observations, policymakers should promote the economic benefits of Islamic finance, which will help improve FI and economic development in Islamic countries. This study emphasises the necessity of policy framework reform to provide Islamic financial services to the poorest in society at low or no cost for better economic benefits.

Most studies tend to overlook important indicators such as insurance, savings and credit penetration while calculating the index. These indicators add value to the existing literature. The majority of prior studies used United Nation Development Programme methodology or principal component analysis for Inclusion Index measurements. The adoption of the entropy weighting method is the novelty of this study.

Existing literature demonstrates the important role of information transparency in enterprise development and market surveillance. However, little empirical research has examined the information transparency effect in supply chain management. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the significant role of information transparency on supply chain financing and its mechanism, taking trade credit as the starting point.

From the data set comprising 3,880 Chinese firms with A-shares listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock Exchanges from 2011 to 2020, we obtain the basic picture of information transparency and trade credit. Panel fixed effects regression is used to test the hypotheses concerning the antecedents to trade credit.

The empirical results show that: first, information transparency can significantly support corporate access to trade credit and is found to facilitate financing by mitigating perceived risk. Second, among companies with higher levels of financing constraints, weaker market power and more concentration of suppliers, information transparency promotes trade credit more markedly. Third, the outbreak of COVID-19 causes a substantial increase in uncertainty and risk in external circumstances and then the effect of information transparency is weakened. Fourth, the contribution to trade credit is likely to be stronger for disclosures containing management transparency elements compared to single financial transparency.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the positive role of information transparency to supply chain financing, which to a certain extent makes up for the lack of information transparency research in the supply chain. It provides new ideas for enterprises to obtain trade credit financing and promote the improvement of supervision departments’ disclosure policies.

This article draws upon our perspective as academic-practitioners working in the fields of food insecurity, food systems, and inequality to comment, in the early stages of the pandemic and associated lockdown, on the empirical and ethical implications of COVID-19 for socio-economic inequalities in access to food in the UK. The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the profound insecurity of large segments of the UK population, an insecurity itself the product of a decade of “austerity” policies. Increased unemployment, reduced hours, and enforced self-isolation for multiple vulnerable groups is likely to lead to an increase in UK food insecurity, exacerbating diet-related health inequalities. The social and economic crisis associated with the pandemic has exposed the fragility of the system of food charity which, at present, is a key response to growing poverty. A vulnerable food system, with just-in-time supply chains, has been challenged by stockpiling. Resultant food supply issues at food banks, alongside rapidly increasing demand and reduced volunteer numbers, has undermined many food charities, especially independent food banks. In the light of this analysis, we make a series of recommendations. We call for an immediate end to the five week wait for Universal Credit and cash grants for low income households. We ask central and local government to recognise that many food aid providers are already at capacity and unable to adopt additional responsibilities. The government's – significant – response to the economic crisis associated with COVID-19 has underscored a key principle: it is the government's responsibility to protect population health, to guarantee household incomes, and to safeguard the economy. Millions of households were in poverty before the pandemic, and millions more will be so unless the government continues to protect household incomes through policy change.

Outgrower scheme as a contractual agreement between farmers and some funding entities has in recent times found proliferation among resource poor farmers in Ghana, especially in northern Ghana. This contractual arrangement, which involves the provision of farm inputs, and in some cases, technical support by the implementing company and the repayment by farmers with portions of their harvest, is often regarded as an effective way to mutually improve the outcomes of both smallholder farmers and outgrower companies. The study aims to analyse. the level of awareness, nature of input package, determinants of participation and intensity of participation in input credit scheme by smallholder rice farmers in the Mamprugu Moagduri District of Ghana’s North East Region, using the Integrated Water Management and Agriculture Development (IWAD) scheme as a case.

Using a quantitative analytical approach, the study gathers information from 233 randomly selected smallholder rice farmers consisting of 150 participants and 83 non-participants using a structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, as well as the Tobit model, are the methods used in the analysis.

The results show that while factors such as age, marital status, number of dependents and farming experience only influenced participation in the scheme, religion, age, sex, number of dependents and farming experience influenced intensity of participation.

This study calls for the adoption of sustainable approaches by input credit companies in their credit support to smallholder farmers rather than the current ad hoc support during each cropping season.

The goal of this study was to determine the impact of access to credit facilities on financial performance among farmers of cooperative societies. The study also tested the predictive power of financial literacy.

The descriptive survey research design was used for the study while the sample size was 240 farmers of cooperative societies from South-East Nigeria. The farmers were categorised into those with access to credit facilities and those without access to credit facilities. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data for the study. Data were analysed using multiple analyses of variance (MANOVA) and multiple regression analysis.

Farmers with access to credit facilities reported higher financial performance such as return on investment, working capital, net profit, profit margin and sales. However, those without access to credit facilities reported lower mean scores on financial performance. Also, financial literacy, like financial knowledge, attitude and awareness, significantly predicts the impact of access to credit facilities on financial performance. It was also found that the duration of repayment of credit facilities, like medium and long term, contributes more to improving financial performance.

This study has shown that even though access to credit facilities impacts financial performance, financial literacy is an important consideration. Also, the duration of repayment is a crucial factor.

This study investigates (1) whether democratization drives sovereign credit ratings (SCR) changes (the “democratic advantage”) or whether SCR changes affect democratization, (2) whether the degree of democratization in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries affects the associations and (3) whether the associations are significantly affected by resource dependence.

This study investigates the effects of SCR changes on democracy in 22 SSA countries over the period of 2000–2020 VEC Granger causality/block exogeneity Wald tests, and impulse responses and variance decomposition analyses with Cholesky ordering and Monte Carlo standard errors in a panel VECM framework.

The full sample impulse responses find that a SCR shock has a long-run detrimental effect on the democracy and political rights but only a short-run positive impact on civil liberties. Among the sub-samples, it is found that the extent of natural resource dependence does not affect the magnitude of SCR shocks on democratization mentioned above but it is found that a SCR shock affects long-run democracy in SSA countries that are relatively more democratic but is more likely to drive democratic deepening in less democratic SSA countries. The full sample variance decompositions further finds that the variance of SCR to a political rights shock outweighs the effects of all the macroeconomic factors, whereas in more diversified SSA countries, the variances of SCR are much greater for democracy and political rights shocks, which suggests that democratization and political rights in diversified SSA economies are severely affected by SCR changes. In the case of the high and low democracy sub-samples, it is found that the variance of SCR in the relatively higher democracy sub-sample is greater than in the low democracy sub-sample.

These results have three implications for democratization in SSA. First, the effect of a SCR change is not a democratically agnostic and impacts political rights to a greater extent than civil liberties. Second, SCR changes have the potential to spark a negative cycle in SSA countries whereby a downgrade leads to a deterioration in socio-political stability coupled with increased financial economic constraints that in turn drive further downgrades and macroeconomic hardship. Finally, SCR changes are potentially detrimental for democracy in more democratic SSA countries but democratically supportive in less democratic SSA countries. Thus, SSA countries that are relatively politically sophisticated are more exposed to the effects of SCR changes, whereas less politically sophisticated SSA countries can proactively shape their SCRs by undertaking political reforms.

This study is the first to examine the associations between SCR and democracy in SSA. This is critical literature for the Africa’s scholarly work given that the debate on unfair rating actions and claims of subjective rating methods is ongoing.

The reason for concern is the rapid decline in loans to small enterprises which is critical to their performance, compared to large businesses following the periods of banking reformations in Nigeria. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of risk perception on bank lending behaviour to small enterprises. It also investigates the impact of government intervention, consolidation and recapitalization on the relationship between risk perception and bank lending behaviour to small enterprise.

This study empirically analysed (ordinary least square) secondary data obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletins, Annual Statement of Accounts covering the period 1992–2020.

The results show that the absence of government interventions and the presence of banking reformations have statistically negative significant effect on bank lending to small enterprises. The findings challenge the argument that generally assumes risk aversion of banks towards small enterprise lending because of small enterprise’s inability to prove their credit worthiness and consequently constraining access to finance to the sector. Instead, the results and analysis from this study found theoretical support for the variation of bank behaviour in lending to small enterprises depending on the status of wealth of the financial system.

A key lesson from this study for government concerned about promoting performance of the small enterprise sector is that regulating and enforcing lending requirements on access to debt financing of the sector is necessary if constraints in access debt finance is to be eliminated. Second, while strategies such as bank consolidation, recapitalization may help strengthen and make financially robust the banking system; it places the banks in a gain position where losses looms to them than gain.

This study challenges the argument that generally assumes risk aversion of banks towards small enterprise lending as a result of inability to prove their credit worthiness and consequently constraining access to finance to the sector. Instead, the results and analysis from this study reveal a variation in lending to small enterprises and suggests that the position of the bank in relation to a reference point influences how risk is perceived by the bank and thus impacts on their risk decision-making behaviour.

In this paper, the heterogeneity of the linkages among financial development, productivity and growth across income groups is emphasized.

An empirical analysis is conducted with an illustrative sample of 130 economies over the period 1991–2019 and classified into four subsamples: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), developing, least developed and net food importing developing countries. Forecast error variance decompositions and panel vector auto-regressive estimations are computed, with insightful findings.

Higher levels of output stimulate the economic development in the agricultural sector, mainly via the productivity channel and, in the most developed economies, also through access to credit. Differently, in developing and least developed economies, the role of access to credit is marginal. The findings have practical implications for stakeholders involved in the planning of long-run investments. In less developed economies, priorities should be given to investments in technology and innovation, whereas financial markets are more suited to boost the development of the agricultural sector of developed economies.

The authors conclude on the credit–output–productivity nexus and contribute to the literature in (at least) three ways. First, they assess how credit access, agricultural output and agricultural productivity are jointly determined. Second, they use a novel approach, which departs from most of the case studies based on single-country data. Third, they conclude on potential causality links to conclude on policy implications.

This study aims to analyze the effect of female top management and female dominant owner on whether firms experience obstacles to obtaining external finance in 136 medium- and low-income countries during 2006–2019. The analysis controls for the role of corporate governance and other firm-specific characteristics, as well as for the impact of national institutions.

The analysis elucidates the economic and non-economic factors driving female corporate leadership. Further, in order to capture the causal effect, the analysis uses univariate tests, multivariate regression analysis, disaggregation testing, sensitivity and endogeneity analysis to confirm the quality of the estimates. The analysis controls for various additional country-level factors.

The results show that female top management and female ownership are broadly significant determinants of firms' access to external finance, especially in relatively larger and more developed countries. The role of controlling shareholders is significant and mediates the gender effect. The latter appears more pronounced in smaller and medium-size firms, operating in the manufacturing and services sectors as well as in the countries with higher levels of development. This also varies with the countries' macroeconomic conditions and institutions governing gender development and equality as well as institutional governance effectiveness.

The results suggest that firms wishing to improve the firms' access to external finance should consider the role of gender in both top management and corporate ownership coupled with the effect of the specific characteristics of firms and the conditioning role of national institutions.

The study examines the gender effects of top management and dominant ownership for the external financing decisions of firms in low- and middle-income countries, which are underresearched. These gender effects are mitigated in various ways by the specific characteristics of firms and especially on national institutions.