Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the compliance of foreign investment projects with local environmental standards in Ethiopia. It examines the cause and impact of the environmental problems created by such projects as well as the necessary policy response, especially by examining the role of the applicable bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in enforcing local standards.

The research approach is fundamentally an empirical study with some doctrinal analysis. The empirical data (qualitative) was collected through interviews, focus group discussions and observation tools.

The investment projects selected for the case studies were not complying with the local environmental standards, which resulted in several environmental problems. The major cause for the overall environmental problems was not a legal gap in the local standards, but the failure of enforcing such standards by the government bodies and foreign investors. The applicable BITs also played no role in environmental protection as they do not impose environmental obligations along with enforcement mechanisms. Non-compliance with local standards can be mitigated if the applicable BITs impose environmental obligations along with workable enforcement mechanisms – as a treaty obligation has more binding force. The author argues that, in general, foreign investments are not environmental-friendly unless otherwise strictly regulated by combining local environmental standards and a BIT that imposes environmental obligations (along with enforcement mechanisms) on the foreign investors, host state and home state.

The existing literature does not deal with the environmental problems, the enforcement constraints and the role of the applicable BITs together in a single publication. They separately address these issues, which do not give a comprehensive understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship. This paper fills this gap by presenting comprehensive findings that combine the environmental problems and the associated enforcement constraints as well as the role of the applicable BITs in this regard. It also contributes to the ongoing debate concerning whether foreign direct investment is good or bad for the environment by producing empirical evidence from Ethiopia, the African continent.

Managing environmental consequences while sustaining economic development necessitate strong commitment and participation of all firms across sectors. However, the environment-related role of foreign and local firms is unclear from previous research. With increasing trade liberalization and entry of foreign firms, this question has become particularly relevant. The purpose of this paper is to contrast the roles and contributions of foreign and local firms from an environmental sustainability perspective.

Using data collected through a structured survey (395 responses) and semi-structured interviews (19 numbers) from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) construction sector (research setting), the study analyses and understands the hypothesized differences between foreign and local firms on three key environmental sustainability aspects: the extent of environmental practices implementation, the strengths/influences of drivers and barriers affecting the implementation, and the environmental, cost-related, and organizational performance benefits derived.

Foreign firms were found to implement environmental practices to a greater extent, have a greater internal drive to implement these practices, and face lower barriers to implementation than local ones. Local firms though were found to be not far behind foreign ones with regards to the environmental, cost-related, and organizational performance benefits derived.

Findings from the study are expected to help policymakers and practitioners develop policies/interventions that ensure all firms irrespective of their nature of ownership contribute equitably to environmental sustainability.

This study is arguably the first comprehensive attempt to understand how various environmental sustainability aspects are perceived and performed by local and foreign firms.

This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.

The aim of this paper is to empirically analyze the extent of the impact stakeholders' pressure has as a determinant of multinational enterprises' MNEs' local environmentally responsible management (ERM), aiming to contribute to the interlocution with stakeholders and ERM strategy establishment of MNE subsidiaries.

To identify key stakeholders, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis was used. The data were collected from 300 foreign subsidiaries established by Korean MNEs from August to December 2012.

The results show the parent company (as a major internal stakeholder) and government, NGOs and media (as external stakeholders) are major factors that promote ERM by subsidiaries. Stakeholder theory provides a comprehensive understanding about stakeholders' pressure as a force to engage overseas subsidiaries with environmental responsibility.

The research contributes to environmental and international business literature by investigating antecedents of ERM of overseas subsidiaries. A stakeholder perspective is used as an overarching theory in order to develop an ERM framework.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a feasible scheme for local governments to regulate corporate environmental data fraud and to discuss whether the influence of the construction of online information disclosure platform on the environmental behavior of enterprises is better than the offline spot check.

Under the background of changing environmental fees into taxes in China, this paper conducts evolutionary game analysis between local governments and enterprises in view of the existing problem of environmental data fraud. Furthermore, through the introduction of government information disclosure platform, this paper discusses the impact of the integration of direct government regulation and indirect public concern regulation on the evolution of environmental behavior of both sides. Finally, the evolutionary game is simulated by adopting system dynamics to analyses the implementation effect of different cases on the game process and game equilibrium.

The results showed that the introduction of information disclosure platform mechanism can effectively suppress the fluctuations existing in the game play and stabilize the game. Moreover, it is worth noting that the regulatory effect of local governments investing part of the monitoring cost in the construction of online information platform is proved to be better than that of putting all the monitoring cost into offline investigation. While optimizing the monitoring cost allocation, the local government still needs to attach great importance to organically combine the attention of the public and media with the governmental official platform.

The obtained results confirm that the proposed model can assist local government in refining the effects of their environmental regulatory decisions, especially in the case of corporate data fraud under environmental tax enforcement.

Previous literature only suggested that local governments should reduce the cost of supervision to change the corporate behavior to a better direction, but no further in-depth study. Thus, this study fills the gap by discussing the positive transformation effect of local government cost allocation scheme on corporate environmental behavior.

The major purpose of this paper is to answer the overarching questions of how multinational corporations (MNCs) address the multiple institutional logics of accountability and pressures of the field in which they operate and how the dominant logic changes and shifts in response to such pressures pre- and post-disaster situation.

In-depth interpretive textual analyses of multiple longitudinal data sets are conducted to study the case of the Fundão dam disaster. The data sources include historical documents, academic articles and public institutional press releases from 2000 to 2016, covering the environment leading to the case study incident and its aftermath.

The findings reveal how MNCs' plurality of and, at times, conflicting institutional logics shape the organizational behaviors, actions and nonactions of actors pre-, peri- and post-disaster. More specifically, the predominance bureaucracy embedded in the state-corporatist logic of the host country before a disaster allows the strategic subunit of an MNC to continue operating while causing various forms of environmental damage until a globally visible disaster triggers a reversal in the dominant logic toward the embrace of wider, global, emergent social and environmental accountability.

This paper contributes to discussions regarding the need to explore in depth of how MNCs respond to multiple institutional pressures in practice. This study extends the literature concerning disaster accountability, state-corporatism and logic-shifting by exploring how MNCs respond to the plurality of institutional logics and pressures over time and showing how, in some cases, logics not only reinforce but also contrast with each other and how a globally exposed disaster may trigger a shift in the dominant logic governing MNCs' responses.

The purpose of this paper is to optimize manure allocation through nutrient budgeting strategy to meet crop nutrient requirements under maximizing economic returns and environmental constraints, and then to evaluate the economic and environmental effects of different nutrient budgeting strategies in animal excreta treatment.

In this study, a holistic integrated “ecological-economic” model is developed. It incorporates the systems of animal-crop production and waste treatment is developed for a pilot pig farm in China in order to simulate the economic and environmental effects of several nutrient budgeting strategies in excreta treatment for resource use.

The results reveal nutrient management deficiencies cause some serious environmental problems. The operations including biogas and composting are economically and environmentally efficient methods for manure management through nutrient budgeting strategy in an intensive animal farming with limited access to cropland. The nutrient budgeting strategy of constrained phosphorus, however, creates better environmental effects and brings more income from the waste treatment than the strategy of constrained nitrogen. The current standard of manure application in cropland which emphasizes on crop requirements for nitrogen should be reconsidered.

The paper is an original work and its methodology makes a meaningful contribution to understanding the relations between different nutrient budgeting strategies and their economic and environmental effects.

The central debate on pollution havens concerns whether the level of environmental regulation in developing countries influences foreign investment location decisions. Most empirical studies are based on aggregate data, while micro-level evidence is relatively lacking in the literature. To fill this research gap, this paper tests for the existence of intracountry pollution havens in China by estimating the determinants of foreign investment flows based on a large firm-level panel dataset. Evidence from this study supports the existence of pollution havens within China in certain industries. However, the sensitivity of foreign investment to environmental regulation varies significantly across industries with different pollution characteristics. Furthermore, when the impact of government subsidies on foreign investment is accounted for, the results show that subsidies can compensate for pollution treatment costs in provinces with stricter environmental regulation.

Firms embrace environmental management strategies for a number of reasons. Government regulation pushes firms to comply with environmental standards, thereby creating a need for companies to manage environmental performance outcomes. Pressure for good environmental performance is also exerted by a variety of stakeholders including investors, customers, non-governmental organizations, local communities, and employees. Increasingly, the investment community has recognized that environmental performance is closely linked to firm value. In Measuring the Future: The Value Creation Index, a 2000 study of intangible drivers of firm value by Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, environmental performance was ranked as a key intangible driver of firm value. Financial measures of firm value have also been empirically linked to environmental liabilities (Barth & McNichols, 1994; Blacconiere & Northcut, 1997; Hughes, 2000), environmental awards (Klassen & McLaughlin, 1996), and to toxic emissions (King & Lenox, 2002). Increasingly, customer demands drive firms to embrace better environmental management practices. For example, both Ford and General Motors require that their suppliers achieve environmental management certification under the International Standards Organization (ISO) 14001 guidelines, and many other large organizations are following suit. From a starting point in 1995 of just 257 ISO 14001 certifications awarded to facilities in 19 countries, the latest data available for 2004 shows that over 90,000 certifications have been awarded to facilities in 127 countries around the world (ISO, 2005). In addition to implementing an environmental strategy as a reaction to external pressures, managers realize that effective environmental performance leads to more favorable internal outcomes. The operational performance outcomes associated with implementing a proactive environmental strategy include reduced waste and discharges, increased efficiency, reduced energy and resource costs, lower risk and liability, better corporate reputation, and reduced compliance costs (Sharma & Vredenburg, 1998; Hart & Ahuja, 1996; Hart, 1995).

This paper aims to propose and assess a core set of environmental and operational sustainability indicators for airport benchmarking, based on research conducted for a decision support tool designed to support airport environmental and operational sustainability. Seeks to make recommendations on the external use of sustainability indicators in stakeholder communication, based on a separate survey of the way in which UK airports use environmental and sustainability benchmarking reports.

The indicators are designed to minimise additional data collection demands while reflecting sustainability theory to a practicable extent.

Bringing core environmental and operational indicators together helps to make their inter‐relationship explicit. The indicators are a minimum set, and their limitations with respect to sustainability are made explicit.

Reports on a survey of the current extent of, and approaches to, stakeholder communication undertaken by airports in the UK, particularly external use of environmental and sustainability benchmarking results.