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The growing interest in sharing information about the preservation of library and archival material has resulted in the production of numerous audiovisual programs on the subject over the past 15 years. Each year more items appear.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Health Manpower Management is split into five sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Management tools; Participation/roles; Types of change; Management Implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the rural credit demand by providing a theoretical and econometric framework which controls the problem of selection bias.

The study is conducted in Assam, India, and uses a quasi-experiment design to gather primary data. Heckman two-stage procedure and type 3 Tobit model are used to evaluate the rural credit demand.

It is observed that, in general, rural households’ credit demand is influenced by the ability and capacity to work, the value of physical assets of the borrowers as well as some other lenders’ and borrowers’ specific factors. But, the direction of causality of the factors influencing borrowers’ credit demand is remarkably different across credit sources.

The study recommends that it is possible to provide an efficient credit demand estimate through a correct theoretical and econometric framework. The possible limitation of the study can be due to the exclusion of the role of “traditional community based organizations” in rural Assam while evaluating the credit demand, and therefore, this limitation is left to future research.

The study contributes to the literature by assessing the probable differences among formal, semiformal and informal credit sources with respect to rural credit demand.

The paper aims to examine the impact of Shari'ah governance quality on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance in Islamic banks.

The study's sample consists of 66 Islamic banks from 14 countries over 2015–2019. The research uses the Heckman model, which is a two-stage estimation method to obtain unbiased estimates, as ESG scores are only observable for 17 Islamic banks in Eikon Refinitiv database at the time of the analysis.

The analysis shows that Shari'ah governance has a beneficial role to achieve ESG performance. The analysis also shows that enhanced profiles of Shari'ah supervisory boards' (SSB) attributes are more efficient than the operational procedures to promote ESG performance. In addition, the analysis shows that enhanced SSBs' attributes strengthen the bank's corporate governance framework, while sound-designed procedures increase the bank's social activities by emphasizing their roles to ensure Shari'ah compliance. Finally, the analysis sheds light on the failure of Shari'ah governance to promote environmental performance.

The existing databases providing companies' ESG-related information still do not offer sufficient data to conduct an international study with a larger sample of Islamic banks (IBs) having ESG scores for a more extended period.

The research provides policy insights to Islamic banks' stakeholders to promote social and governance performance in the Islamic finance industry through improving Shari'ah governance practices. However, raising environmental awareness is imminent among all actors implicated in the Shari'ah governance processes to help overcome the anthropogenic risks.

The research complements the governance-banks' ESG performance literature by examining the role of Shari'ah governance. The research also extends the literature on Islamic banks' sustainability by pointing to the Shari'ah governance failure to enhance environmental performance and thus achieve Maqasid al-Shariah regarding the environment.

Using a unique dataset of a commercial microfinance institution (MFI) in Tanzania, the purpose of this paper is to investigate first whether agricultural firms have a different probability to get a loan and whether their loans are differently volume rationed than loans to non‐agricultural firms. Second, the paper analyzes whether agricultural firms repay their loans with different delinquencies than non‐agricultural firms.

The authors estimate a Probit‐Model for the probability of receiving a loan, a Heckman‐Model to investigate the magnitude of volume rationing for all loan applications and an OLS‐Model to examine the loan delinquencies of all microloans disbursed by the MFI.

The results reveal that agricultural firms face higher obstacles to get credit but as soon as they have access to credit, their loans are not differently volume rationed than those of non‐agricultural firms. Furthermore, agricultural firms are less often delinquent when paying back their loans than non‐agricultural firms.

Even if the authors can show that access to credit and loan repayment is different for agricultural firms, the current regional focus of the MFI only allows for lending to agricultural firms in the greater Dar es Salaam area. Thus, these results might change in a rural setting. Besides general differences of the rural economic environment, the production type of agricultural firms might also differ in rural areas. Also, these results might change in different country contexts.

The findings suggest that a higher risk exposition typically attributed to agricultural production must not necessarily lead to higher credit risk. They also show that the investigated MFI overestimates the credit risk of agricultural clients and, hence, should reconsider its risk assessment practice to be able to increase lending to the agricultural sector. In addition, the results might indicate that farmers qualify less often for a loan as they do not fit into the standard microcredit product.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper which simultaneously investigates access to credit and the repayment behavior of agricultural firms.

Conventional wisdom suggests that war in the host country makes it unattractive for foreign firms to invest. To see if this is true for US firms on the aggregate, this paper aims to examine the veracity of a “permanent war economy” hypothesis, that foreign direct investment (FDI) may, in fact, increase in the host country not despite, but because of, war, i.e. one that lends credence to the idea that, in the USA, “defense [has] become one of constant preparation for future wars and foreign interventions rather than an exercise in response to one-off threats.”

The authors test the hypotheses using Generalized Method of Moments estimation, with Heckman Selection, on US FDI data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and war data from the Correlates of War2 Project, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program/International Peace Research Institute data set, the International Crisis Behavior Project and the Center for Systemic Peace Major Episodes of Political Violence data set. The final sample consists of 351 country-year observations in 55 host countries from 1982 to 2006.

The findings indicate that overall US FDI in a host country in a given year decreases if the host country is engaged in wars with multiple countries and if the US Government is involved in the war. Most notably, the results show that US involvement in multiple host country wars is actually correlated with increased US FDI into the host country, providing empirical support for the “permanent war economy” hypothesis.

While other studies have focused on war and FDI, the authors have sought to show the impact of the involvement of arguably the most influential country, i.e. the USA, in the sovereign matters of a focal host country. By studying FDI from the USA as a function of US involvement in wars overseas, over the years with the greatest use of private military companies by the USA and the largest portion of global FDI accounted for by the USA, this work motivates a research agenda on home-host-"other” relations in the context of war and FDI, with the “other” being the supranational “elephant in the room.”