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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of governance indicators (political stability, control of corruption, rule of law, regularity quality, voice and accountability and government effectiveness) on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to African countries.

The authors employed a panel regression model on data from 50 African countries for the period 1996 to 2010. The empirical analysis uses the fixed and random effects estimation.

The results obtained through fixed and random effects indicate that out of the six World Bank's governance indicators, three are statistically significant. These are voice and accountability, government effectiveness and rule of law. This result implies that to improve their investment climate and increase the inflow of FDI, African countries need to improve the state of governance.

The major limitation of this paper is the absence of different sources for governance indicators, and absence of long time series data on some other governance indicators such as transparency.

These results lead to the conclusion that some governance indicators are very important for foreign investors in their investment decisions, while other indicators are not. Governments have to consider these indicators while trying to attract foreign investment.

In integrated reporting, financial and non-financial performance is presented interactively, as the value creation abilities of corporations are shaped via capitals, the importance of the topic increases day by day. In addition to this, differentiation of importance of basic and sub-dimensions representing capitals between institutions leads to questions on which weight these should take place. From this point, this paper aims to develop capitals in integrated reporting and to weight the indicators representing them.

In this study, first, to ensure that each component of capital is included in integrated reporting, governance capital has been added to capitals, which are identified in the international integrated reporting framework (the framework). Then, weights of each capital dimension and indicators within these dimensions have been determined in a banking sector example with the entropy method.

Including the 2014-2017 period, an efficient weight assessment approach with the entropy method has been presented and it was observed that the most weighted element is the intellectual capital.

The limitations of this study are the lack of an agreed general indicator framework for indicators representing multiple capitals in integrated reporting, each bank’s data disclosure of different indicators and differentiation of the shared data between sources.

This study guides the weighting studies necessary for integrated performance measurement.

It is foreseen that this study will be effective in the development of integrated thinking and this effect will contribute to the overall functioning of all sectors beyond the banking sector, which is the application area of the study.

The study is the first original study in the literature in terms of providing a new dimension by adding the governance capital to the capitals defined in the Framework.

The purpose of this study is to examine mediating role of public sector governance in the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth in the Palestinian context during the years 2005–2020.

The necessary data were collected from the World Bank website and the annual financial reports of the Palestinian Monetary Authority. To achieve the study’s objectives, the researcher used content analysis method and regression model.

There is an effect of some dimensions of entrepreneurship (starting a business, obtaining credit, women starting a business) and public sector governance with dimensions (voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, effectiveness of government performance, organizational quality, the rule of law and control of corruption) on economic growth. In addition, there is no mediating effect of public sector governance in the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth.

The study helps in enhancing the elements of entrepreneurship by evaluating public governance in Palestine. It also offers future researchers a comprehensive vision that encourages Palestinian economic growth.

The paper contributes to showing the reality of public governance indicators for the Palestinian context and the amount of support for entrepreneurial activities indicators that affect economic growth.

Trying to activate cooperation mechanisms between government institutions and entrepreneurial institutions to adopt creative projects and ideas, especially for women, needs to focus on activating the principles of public sector governance in addition to facilitating administrative and financial procedures to start commercial projects in a way that enhances economic growth with the need to achieve the highest level of public sector governance indicators.

The purpose of this paper is to present theoretical and empirical arguments for the role of mobile telephony in promoting good governance in 47 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2000–2012.

The empirical inquiry uses an endogeneity-robust GMM approach with forward orthogonal deviations to analyze the linkage between mobile phone usage and the variation in three broad governance categories – political, economic and institutional.

Three key findings are established: first, in terms of individual governance indicators, mobile phones consistently stimulated good governance by the same magnitude, with the exception of the effect on the regulation component of economic governance. Second, when indicators are combined, the effect of mobile phones on general governance is three times higher than that on the institutional governance category. Third, countries with lower levels of governance indicators are catching-up with their counterparts with more advanced dynamics.

The study makes both theoretical and empirical contributions by highlighting the importance of various combinations of governance indicators and their responsiveness to mobile phone usage.

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of adopting the principles of corporate governance on the financial performance of companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE). To assess the implementation of corporate governance principles, the authors built an index based on the principles specified in the BSE Corporate Governance Code (CGC).

An econometric analysis was conducted to estimate the impact that the authors’ corporate governance indicator had on financial performance, measured successively through Tobin's Q, return on equity (ROE), economic value added (EVA) and total shareholder return (TSR).

Following the regression model, the authors noticed the absence of a significant impact of corporate governance practices on performance measured by ROE, EVA and TSR but instead, a significant and positive relationship for Tobin's Q rate was found.

Due to the lack of data before the implementation of the BSE Code of Corporate Governance, the research period is limited to 2010–2015, but the authors’ future studies will try to extend the research period.

Although numerous studies have been conducted to analyze the empirical relationship between corporate governance and financial performance, no conclusive results have been obtained. The diversity of these findings can refer to methods used in the construction of a corporate governance measure as well as to the accuracy of financial reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to benchmarking the governance performance of Indian states.

This paper provides a framework to measure governance performance at the state level. Using the data on 28 key indicators, the authors evaluate Indian states on seven broad dimensions of governance quality covering several aspects of public service delivery, regulatory quality and law and order. The empirical methodology involves the application of multi-criteria decision making techniques in two steps. The authors, first develop suitable weights of the identified dimensions and criteria under each dimension by applying the inputs of an expert-based decision-panel in a best-worst framework. Next, using these weights, the authors evaluate ranking of each state using TOPSIS and PROMETHEE-II methods.

The results indicate wide disparities in the governance performance of Indian states. Based on different indicators, the paper evaluates the rank of all the major Indian states. Results reveal that “Social Service Delivery(S)” is the most influencing dimension for the development of a state. Overall, the authors find Andra Pradesh, NCT of Delhi and Goa to be the leading states in terms of governance quality.

The paper provides policy makers with easy to use operational indicators to analyse the governance performance of Indian states. These would help in better monitoring of these states through competitive goal-setting for continuous improvement.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first formal assessment of governance quality in the Indian states in a multi-criteria framework. To this end, the paper addresses the issue of wide regional disparities in the country. The findings of the paper provide powerful insights to policy makers in setting up appropriate strategies to eliminate these disparities.

The question of public debt management for both developed and developing economies has created an enormous amount of political as well as academic interest. The purpose of this paper is to examine how governance affects public debt accumulation in the Arabian Gulf countries during the period between 1996 and 2015 period. The six Worldwide Governance indicators (WGI) (voice and accountability (VAA), political stability and the absence of violence/terrorism, government effectiveness (GEFF), regulatory quality (RQ), rule of law (RL) and control of corruption) were used to measure the quality of governance in these countries. The results show that an increase in every governance indicator except control of corruption leads to a decrease in public debt.

The authors estimate a dynamic specification of debt to GDP ratio to study how governance affects public debt accumulation in the Arabian Gulf countries during the 1996–2015 period. The dependent variable in this study is the ratio of public debt to GDP. This study relies on the six measures of institution’s quality given by the WGI. These variables are the VAA, political stability and absence of violence (PSAV)/terrorism, GEFF, RQ, RL and control of corruption. Additional control variables are also incorporated to account for the omitted variables bias. These include the rate of inflation (Al-Marhubi, 2000) and the independent variable lagged one period. The study of the statistical relationship between institutional quality and public debt allows us to quantify the direct effect of governance on public debt, which is the effect that goes through an increase in spending or a reduction in fiscal revenues and not through a decrease in GDP growth. The econometric estimation is carried out using panel fixed effects and GLS random effects.

The estimation results confirm the core hypothesis, which considers that the poor governance in a country the higher is the ratio of public debt to GDP, ceteris paribus. Indeed, five of the worldwide Governance Index are negatively correlated with public debt ratio. These indices are GEFF, VAA, PSAV, RQ and RL. Empirical findings for other independent variables are consistent with those of empirical studies in the literature. The coefficient on the independent variable per capita income has the theoretically expected negative sign and it is highly statistically significant, implying that the higher the per capita income in a country, the lower the ratio of public debt. The independent variable government expenditure has the theoretically expected positive sign suggesting that the higher the government expenditure, the higher the ratio of public debt. The education variable has negative but not statistically significant coefficients. The independent variables (inflation, unemployment rate and lag debt ratio) have the expected signs and are highly statistically significant, implying that the higher their value in a country, the higher the ratio of public debt to GDP. Having the theoretically expected effect, the GDP growth variable is negatively correlated with public debt ratio but its coefficients are not statistically significant.

Although the literature on the damaging effects of poor governance on growth is abundant (Tanzi and Davoodi, 2002; Mauro, 1996; Mo, 2001; Mauro, 1996; Brunetti et al., 1997; Campos et al., 1999; Al-Marhubi, 2000; Depken and Lafountain, 2006; Mauro, 1998), only very recently the relationship between institutional quality and public debt accumulation has been addressed. By reviewing the research on political and institutional determinants of public debt, it was found that there are few studies, which have examined regional differences, and even fewer ones have focused on the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Therefore, this paper aims to fill the gap by focusing on this economic region. Furthermore, when studying the relationship between the quality of institutions and the accumulation of public debt, existing studies focus only on corruption index and neglect other determinants of governance. Thus, a second contribution of the study is to investigate how institution quality, through the six WGI, affects public debt accumulation. Furthermore, given the recent rise in public debt in GCC countries, an increasingly important question is what policy actions do these countries need to take to ensure that their debt will be sustainable and will not overwhelm their financial system? we can add: while there has been much attention given to the political and economic explanations of public debt accumulation in developing and developed countries on a global scale, scholars so far have not focused on this debate in high income oil producers.

The relationship between gender and governance is often neglected in both conceptual and empirical work. However, gender equality in the decision-making fora is vital, for enabling far-reaching social change and for empowering people excluded from decision making. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the participation of women in governance institutions in a small island economy like Mauritius. Though, there has been some progress in Mauritius in redressing the gender imbalance in national and local governance processes, more is still to be achieved. This paper analyses women participation in governance by using gender-sensitive governance indicators.

Data were collected from different sources namely from the Mauritian Electoral Commissioner's Office, Statistics Mauritius, Mauritius Household Budget Surveys and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources. Data were also made available from the Global Gender Gap Report, 2012; the Global Parliamentary Report, 2012 and the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer, 2012. These data were used in the computation of gender-sensitive governance indicators used by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2006). The indicators are the Global Gender Gap Index, the percentage of seats reserved in parliament for women, voter turnout among registered females and prevalence of women in poor districts.

The paper argues that the overall gender gap index for Mauritius has increased over the years but the scores for economic participation and political attainment remain very low. In the economic sphere, the author note a rising female unemployment rate, though girls perform better than boys at all educational levels. Mauritius has been adept at the politics of recognition of different ethnic groups but this approach has not addressed the issue of women. The findings reveal that women are often excluded from decision making, from the household up to the highest levels of policymaking. The “invisibility” of women in parliament, is a concern and is “a grave democratic deficit” for the country (Sachs, 2001).

No study has taken a gender perspective of governance issues in Mauritius. The author assess the importance of gender in a democratic country like Mauritius which has performed well on the economic front but gender is still too often ignored in governance and other spheres. There is thus a growing need for greater gender equality and participation of women in governance institutions and processes.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between public health spending and health outcome using time series data in Nigeria over the period 1980 to 2017, taking into account the role of governance by assessing how the quality of governance directly affects health status and indirectly as a mediator for the effectiveness of public health spending.

Using the Hausman statistical tests to check for the existence of endogeneity, the proper method for estimating the model for this study is the two-stage least square regression model. The two-stage least squares regression model addresses the problem of endogeneity using instrumental variables. The mediating role of governance on the effectiveness of public health spending on health was considered by an interaction of governance indicators with public health spending.

The results showed that public health spending had no significant effect on health outcome except when interacted with governance quality. The interaction of government health spending with governance effectiveness as well as that for control of corruption improved health by inducing a fall in maternal deaths, whereas government health expenditure interacted with rule of law raised maternal mortality. Public health spending interacted with regulatory quality improved life expectancy while that for political stability with public health spending induced a fall in life expectancy, poor maternal and infant health. Political stability and the control of corruption had direct influence on maternal health.

Given the predominance of public health spending in promoting access to health care and population health status for developing economies, the effectiveness of such spending should be top priority in policy makers’ agenda. This again is important because for developing economies, government revenue is generated from a small tax base due to their highly informal nature. To improve health status from public intervention in the health sector, there is indeed need for improvement in the overall state of governance in Nigeria.

This paper is one of the few country case studies which uses time series data to examine the role of governance on the efficacy of public health spending with extension of findings to maternal health and covering more measures of governance quality. The results fundamentally illuminate the importance of governance in fostering development in health and consequently enhancing economic development and growth.

Clinical governance should be based on cultural elements that value lifelong learning, skill development and research. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a set of indicators to improve educational governance in hospitals.

Key indicators were identified from the international and national literatures. Later, the indicators were rated and prioritized by a multidisciplinary panel of medical professionals using two rounds of Delphi technique. Subsequently at two consensus meetings, the panel evaluated the indicators.

A set of 51 draft indicators were identified. The expert panel members rated 28 indicators as high priority indicators for measuring educational performance of the hospitals.

This set of indicators can be used to measure the educational performance of the hospitals in identifying the gaps and take steps to resolve them.

Education and training is the basic component of clinical governance. Hospital staff education and training is a fundamental step towards organizational and individual development. To improve the educational performance at hospital level it is necessary to reliably measure such performance. This can be done through developing and using relevant indicators. There are limited systematic studies, especially in middle and low income countries, to introduce appropriate indicators. This study has investigated developing a set of indicators to measure and improve the educational performance in hospitals.