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The study investigates the relationship between foreign direct investment flows and economic growth in Nigeria. The study became necessary because as never before, the civilian governments since 1999 have employed several strategies to ensure increased flow of FDI into Nigeria because of its perceived benefits as lauded in the theoretical literature as the panacea for economic underdevelopment. The study utilized simple OLS regression analysis and conducted various econometrics tests on our model so as to obtain the best linear unbiased estimators. The study confirmed the beneficial role of FDI in growth. However, the role of FDI on growth could be limited by human capital. The study concluded that indeed, FDI promotes economic growth, and hence the need for more infrastructural development, ensuring sound macroeconomic environment as well as ensuring human capital development is essential to boosting FDI productivity and flow into the country.

This study explores the extent of environmental management and reporting regulations in Nigeria, highlighting areas of inadequacies in regulatory enforcement and companies’ compliance. We approach the review within the context of the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (SDA).

This chapter is based on a systematic review of extant environmental regulations and academic literature.

The results show several inadequacies with respect to Nigeria’s environmental management and reporting regulations. We specifically note the changing environmental management and reporting landscape in Nigeria birthing several emerging mandatory reporting codes. We find that fragmented reporting regulations and inappropriate sanctions are responsible for the unsatisfactory compliance and disclosure level noted among firms in the country. Additionally, weak enforcement, funding limitations, unrealistic financial penalties, and general implementation deficits remain factors impeding effective environmental management practice in Nigeria.

This research provides insight into environmental management and reporting inadequacies in Nigeria, and the actions regulators and firm managers need to take on board to help the country actualize the UN 2030 SDA.

Since its inception, the term ‘corporate governance’ (CG) has attracted mainstream attention, continuing to generate discussion among academics, practitioners and policy-makers. This heightened interest generally revolves around clarifying the principles of CG, both in theory and practice. This is particularly important in the context of emerging economies, where the sociocultural ethos and values often differ from those of most developed economies, where the CG concept was conceived and developed. In this vein, this chapter draws on empirical data to explore practical CG challenges faced by corporations in the Nigerian manufacturing and banking sectors. Nigeria is a country whose dominant national culture is one of high-power distance (HPD), which endorses servant-master relationships and encourages deference to authority. In this study, we found that HPD culture can undermine stakeholders’ ability to hold corporate executives to account on practices and behaviours that are antithetical to principles of corporate integrity and ethics, accountability, transparency, autonomy and stakeholder engagement, which in turn, leads to (and exacerbates) corporate misgovernance among businesses in the sectors. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are expatiated in the discussion section.

This chapter investigates the relevance of sustainability accounting practice (SAP) in the actualisation of the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) 2030. Whilst the SDGs appear general, broad and far-reaching, the sustainable development agenda (SDA) impliedly places responsibilities on member nations to evolve strategies that will ensure the achievement of the SDGs in their respective countries in accordance with national circumstances and peculiar challenges. This brings to bear the need to consider measures to translate the SDGs to realities, especially in developing countries. We use a structured questionnaire to collect data on the application of SAP from publicly listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. Secondary data on economic performance were obtained from the annual reports of companies for 5 years (2014–2018). Structural Equation Modelling and Mann-Whitney test were applied to analyse data. Result suggests that whilst the implementation level of SAP by companies is generally moderate, internalities/‘pull factors’ such as market orientation and deliberate strategy formulation significantly determine the sophistication level of SAP. The insignificant effect of the externalities/‘push factors’ (i.e. environmental uncertainty, structure of ownership and control, and intensity of competition) on SAP suggests that external pressure on companies to implement sustainability initiatives is weak. We also find that extensive usage of SAP can sustain economic performance in the long run. The chapter provides empirical evidence that manufacturing companies extensively implementing SATs can sustain economic performance and would likely have enough economic resources to implement some initiatives that are fundamental to the actualisation of the SDGs 2030. The chapter contributes to the sparse literature on sustainability practice in developing countries, and incrementally adds to knowledge on the factors driving SAP in a jurisdiction characterised by lax regulatory framework and weak institutional apparatus on sustainability. As evident in our findings, SAP engenders sustainable economic performance.

This paper aims to examine two important issues in corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship. First, the study problematises CSR as a form of self-regulation. Second, the research explores how CSR strategies can enable firms to recognise and internalise their externalities while preserving shareholder value.

This study uses a tinged shareholder model to understand the interactions between an organisation’s CSR approach and the effect of relevant externalities on its CSR outcomes. In doing this, the case study qualitative methodology is adopted, relying on data from one Fidelity Bank, Nigeria.

By articulating a tripodal thematic model – governance of externalities in the economy, governance of externalities in the social system and governance of externalities in the environment, this paper demonstrates how an effective combination of these themes triggers the emergence of a robust CSR culture in an organisation.

This research advances the understanding of the implication of internalising externalities in the CSR literature in a relatively under-researched context – Nigeria.

The data of this study allows to present a governance model that will enable managers to focus on their overarching objective of shareholder value without the challenges of pursuing multiple and sometimes conflicting goals that typically create negative impacts to non-shareholding stakeholders.

Financial inclusion and digital finance go side by side and help enhance agricultural activities; however, the magnitude of digital financial services varies across countries. In line with this argument, this study aims to examine whether financial inclusion enhances agricultural participation and decompose the significance of the difference in determinants of agricultural participation between financially included – not financially included households and digital finance – no digital finance households.

This study uses Pakistan’s household integrated economic survey 2018/19 to test hypotheses. The logit model is used to examine the effect of financial inclusion on agriculture participation. Moreover, this study employs a nonlinear Fairlie Oaxaca Blinder technique to investigate the difference in determinants of agricultural participation.

This study reports that financial inclusion positively influences agricultural participation, meaning households may have access to financial services and participate in agricultural activities. The results suggest that the likelihood of participating in agriculture in households with mobiles and smartphones is higher. Moreover, household size, income, age, gender, education, urban, remittances from abroad, fertilizer, pesticides, wheat, cotton, sugarcane, fruits and vegetables are the significant determinants of agricultural participation. To distinguish the financially included – not financially included households’ gap, this study employs a nonlinear Fairlie Oaxaca Blinder decomposition and finds that differences in fertilizer explain the substantial gap in agricultural participation. Likewise, this study tests the digital finance – no digital finance gap and finds that the difference in fertilizer is a significant contributor, describing a considerable gap in agricultural participation.

Empirically identified that various factors cause agricultural participation including financial inclusion and digital finance. Regarding the research limitation, this study only considers a developing country to analyze the findings. However, for future research, scholars may consider some other countries to compare the results and identify their differences.

The accessibility of fertilizer can reduce the agricultural participation gap. However, increased income level, education and cotton and sugar production can also overcome the differences in agriculture participation between digital finance and no digital finance households.

This is the first study to decompose the difference in determinants of agricultural participation between financially and not financially included households.

Innovative firms leverage big data analytics (BDA) benefits in optimising value creation, particularly in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. Examples of this are found in new product success and product innovation performance. However, knowledge of how innovative firms and their corporate customers generate insights from big data, develop new products and gain higher-quality service from intra- and inter organisations' resources is limited. This knowledge manifests in the form of opportunities available in BDA and through the adoption of the co-creation approach to generate value in the form of new product innovation. BDA reflects an excellent means of enhancing a firm's customer agility, but how this is possible remains largely unknown.

In this research, the authors hypothesise that new product success is a function of a firm's customer agility and product innovation performance moderated by environmental turbulences. In turn, the firm's customer agility is enhanced by the effect of big data aggregation and analytical tools. These hypotheses have been confirmed by a survey in an emerging market.

The authors use structural equation modelling to test the authors’ hypotheses. The main contribution of this research is the conceptualisation and test of an integrative framework identifying the links among a firm's customer agility, new product success and BDA capabilities.

The study established that BDA tools – the effective use of data aggregation tools and the effective use of data analysis tools – shape customer agility in achieving new product success. This study contributes to one’s understanding of the relevance of BDA in B2B value creation contexts.

The study findings show that BDA shapes a firm's customer agility in achieving new product success.