Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the impacts that the recent proliferation of private and overlapping standards is having in the trade of agricultural products from developing countries.

In a first stage industry experts in the Chilean fresh fruit trading industry were interviewed to understand the perceived impact that private standards are imposing in the industry. These interviews allowed to identify the market case study, table grapes, the landscape of private standards and their prevalence in different countries. In a second stage, a gravity trade model for trade in table grapes was estimated, with a focus on the more stringent countries identified by experts in the first stage.

We show evidence that the proliferation of private standards required by large European retailers has diverted trade away from more stringent countries that require more certifications (and into less stringent European markets). We also show that the costs of these additional certifications have been shared by trading partners, via an increase in direct sales, as opposed to consignment (the traditional marketing mode), which is associated with higher prices.

The impacts of the recent proliferation of private and overlapping standards in international trade needs to be better understood both by the legal and economic literature. While the use of private standards has been growing since the 1990s, there is a recent trend of large European retailers imposing their own and overlapping standards that needs to be better understood to inform policy.

While there is a thin literature on the impact of private standards on trade, most of this has studied the effects of the now de facto mandatory GlobalGAP certification. However, there is a recent trend by large European retailers of demanding their own private certifications, together with other already existing overlapping private standards. This study describes and analyzes the impacts of this rather new trend.

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between audit committee expertise and asymmetric information in the US equity market.

The authors use measures of information asymmetry for 705 US firms (5,260 firm-year observations) over the period from 2007 to 2018, and use the theory of expertise (Ericsson and Smith, 1991) to examine the association between audit committee financial expertise and information asymmetry. The authors use multiple econometric approaches such as firm fixed-effect regression and two-stage ordinary least squares regression to control for possible endogeneity and reverse causality and find that the results remain the same.

The authors find that the existence of an audit committee with financial expertise is negatively and significantly associated with information asymmetry. The authors further provide empirical evidence through which audit committee financial expertise affects the firm’s informational environment. Additional analysis supports the argument that the audit committee’s financial expertise enhances the firm’s informational environment by increasing (decreasing) analyst following (dispersion).

One limitation to consider, like most studies on audit committees, is that the authors do not examine the actual role performed by the audit committee. The authors focus on the characteristics stipulated by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act 2002 and stock exchange rules regarding the financial expertise of audit committee members only.

This study is useful to policy makers, standard setters, investors, activists, managers, lenders and various stakeholders who rely on the financial statements of firms with an expert audit committee on board. The outcome of this study promotes recruiting audit committees with financial expertise due to the assumed benefits of this trait to the US firm.

The results of this study are not event-dependent and therefore have persistent effects, which is important to the evaluation of the usefulness of a regulation. This study promotes recruiting audit committees with financial expertise on boards because of the assumed benefits to the firm and investors.

This study is the first to document that financial expertise of audit committee characteristics is not only negatively related to the magnitude of information asymmetry but also driven by the financial expertise of audit committee members rather than chairs.

Although the theoretical arguments provide several channels through which innovation affects export, empirical validation of this relationship is scarce. Further, the impact of the diverse channels of domestic and foreign research and development (R&D) on export is assessed in isolation by previous studies. This paper empirically investigates the impact of technological innovation on export capacity and intensity of industrial enterprises in emerging countries by considering three channels of domestic innovation and foreign R&D spillovers, namely internal R&D, embodied knowledge and disembodied knowledge in a unified framework.

Data on China's industrial enterprises in the manufacturing sector are extracted from the China National Bureau of Statistics (NBSC), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (MST) and the UN Comtrade database for the period from 1998 to 2020. The instrumental variables two-stage least squares (IV-2SLS) and three-stage least squares (IV-3SLS) methods are used to control for the possible endogeneity bias and the problem of cross-equation correlation between residuals.

The results show that internal R&D is a critical factor to enhance the export performance of enterprises in emerging countries, while the effect of embodied spillovers and public–private collaboration on export capacity and intensity of industrial enterprises is substantial. Further, disembodied knowledge that is acquired through licensing of technology from advanced countries does not directly contribute to the export performance of enterprises but requires a threshold level of internal R&D capability. This study’s results also report a greater effect of embodied knowledge spillovers on export capacity and export intensity than internal R&D in emerging countries. The results are consistent to changes in the sample period and the estimation methods. The findings of the paper suggest that developing countries can speed up the process of export upgrading by relying on both domestic and foreign R&D efforts.

The findings would help policymakers to keep in mind the relative importance of internal R&D and embodied and disembodied knowledge spillovers for export performance before formulating a catch-up strategy and the outcome would encourage them to consider prior related knowledge in terms of internal R&D capability while acquiring external technology.

This study fills the gap in the existing literature by providing empirical validation of the innovation–export interplay and simultaneously assessing the effect of three diverse channels of technological innovation on the export performance of industrial enterprises. This paper enunciates important policy lessons for emerging countries' smooth transition to a knowledge-based economy.

The paper contributes to the literature on investment and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Specifically, the study examined the separate role of private and public investment in poverty reduction in a panel of 40 sub-Saharan African countries.

For robustness, the study adopts a variety of estimation techniques. These include the fixed effect (within) regression model, the two-step system generalised method of moments (GMM) and the pooled OLS with Driscoll-Kraay robust standard errors to account for the well-known problems of endogeneity, heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence inherent in panel data.

The empirical results show that the reducing impact of public investment on poverty is marginal, while private investment has a significant reducing impact on poverty. The study also found that access to social services, such as water and sanitation, and credit are important determinants of investment in SSA. The research and policy implications are discussed.

The study investigated the separate effect of private and public investments on poverty in SSA, unlike the existing studies that adopted total investment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which interdisciplinary (HASS, i.e. non-STEM) factors—in particular, accounting, stakeholder management and accountability—enable, influence and motivate large human exploration ventures, principally in maritime and space fields, utilizing Columbus’s and Chinese explorations of the 1400s as the primary setting.

The study analyzes archival data from narrative and interpretational history, including both academic and non-academic sources, that relate to two global historical events, the Columbus and Ming Chinese exploration eras (c. 1400–1500), as a parallel to the modern “Space Race”. Existing studies on pertinent HASS (Humanities and Social Sciences) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) enablers, influencers and motivators are utilized in the analysis. The authors draw upon the concepts of stakeholder theory and the construct of accountability in their analysis.

Findings suggest that non-STEM considerations—politics, finance, accountability, culture, theology and others—played crucial roles in enabling Western Europe (Columbus) to reach the Americas before China or other global powers, demonstrating the pivotal importance of HASS factors in human advancements and exploration.

In seeking to answer those questions, this study identifies only those factors (HASS or STEM) that may support the success or failure in execution of the exploration and development of a region such as the New World or Space. Moreover, the study has the following limitation. Relative successes, failures, drivers and enablers of exploratory ventures are drawn almost exclusively from the documented historical records of the nations, entities and individuals (China and Europe) who conducted those ventures. A paucity of objective sources in some fields, and the need to set appropriate boundaries for the study, also necessitate such limitation.

It is observable that many of those HASS factors also appear to have been influencers in modern era Space projects. For Apollo and Soyuz, success factors such as the relative economics of USA and USSR, their political ideologies, accountabilities and organizational priorities have clear echoes. What the successful voyages of Columbus and Apollo also have in common is an appetite to take risks for an uncertain return, whether as sponsor or voyager; an understanding of financial management and benefits measurement, and a leadership (Isabella I, John F. Kennedy) possessing a vision, ideology and governmental apparatus to further the venture’s goals.

Whilst various historical studies have examined influences behind the oceangoing explorations of the 1400s and the colonization of the “New World”, this article takes an original approach of analyzing those motivations and other factors collectively, in interdisciplinary terms (HASS and STEM). This approach also has the potential to provide a novel method of examining accountability and performance in modern exploratory ventures, such as crewed space missions.

This study aims to investigate the main drivers of private saving in Egypt (2005–2020).

It employs an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach for quarterly data on private saving, lagged private saving, real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, public saving, inflation, real interest rate, money supply, current account deficit and unemployment.

Private saving in Egypt displays persistency and public saving depresses private saving in the short run and long run. Real interest rate, inflation and unemployment have negative and statistically significant impacts on private saving in the short run and long run. The current account deficit displays a negative effect on private saving but is significant only in the short run. Other incorporated variables, like real GDP and money supply, are not statistically significant. This could be attributed to the high consumption rather than saving motive of the Egyptian population and their tendency to rely more on other informal saving channels.

Findings are of policy relevance as unleashing the determinants of private saving guides policymakers in formulating the appropriate sustainable development policies. It also assists in identifying the main obstacles hindering the promotion of private saving and hence major areas for policy intervention, like financial inclusion, poverty eradication, employment generation and structural reforms.

This study contributes to the literature: (1) it tackles private saving figure rather than aggregate saving figure that is covered by similar studies due to lack of consistent data, (2) given the relatively low quality, unavailability and inconsistency of data on private saving in developing countries, investigating the determinants of private saving should be carried out on an individual country basis which is done by this study, (3) this study fulfills the gap in literature related to the lack of up-to-date studies on private saving in Egypt and (4) it relies on quarterly data that could produce more reliable results.

This study examines the influence of stock liquidity on stock price crash risk and the moderating role of institutional blockholders in Vietnam’s stock market.

Crash risk is measured by the negative coefficient of skewness of firm-specific weekly returns (NCSKEW) and the down-to-up volatility of firm-specific weekly stock returns (DUVOL). Liquidity is measured by adjusted Amihud illiquidity. The two-stage least squares method is used to address endogeneity issues.

Using firm-level data from Vietnam, we find that crash risk increases with stock liquidity. The relationship is stronger in firms owned by institutional blockholders. Moreover, intensive selling by institutional blockholders in the future will positively moderate the relationship between liquidity and crash risk.

Since stock liquidity could exacerbate crash risk through institutional blockholder trading, firm managers should avoid bad news accumulation and practice timely information disclosures. Investors should be mindful of the risk associated with liquidity and blockholder trading.

We contribute to the literature by showing that the activities of blockholders could partly explain the relationship between liquidity and crash risk. High liquidity encourages blockholders to exit upon receiving private bad news.

This paper examines the effect of bond market development on economic growth of selected developing countries from 1990 to 2020. Previous studies provide inconsistent results on the effect of bond market development on economic growth. Some results reveal positive effects while others show negative effects of bond market development on economic growth. These conflicting findings have motivated research.

The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and co-integration methods are used for analysis. The gross domestic product per capita proxies economic growth while government bond capitalisation and corporate bond capitalisation measure bond market development.

The findings unveil a long-term effect within the series. The results disclose that government bond capitalisation, trade openness and inflation positively affect economic growth while corporate bond capitalisation and domestic credit to the private sector presents negative effects on economic growth.

The results propose that the governments should issue more bonds to raise funds for long-term economic growth initiatives. The governments should promote bond market development such that the corporate bonds issued boost economic growth by limiting lengthy documentations and bottlenecks in the bond market listing and issue procedures. The policymakers and regulatory authorities should implement policies which attract investors and encourage companies' listing in the countries' bond markets.

The study’s findings add value that government bond capitalisation positively impacts economic growth, while corporate bond capitalisation negatively affects economic growth in developing countries.

This study delves into the nuanced implications of short-sale constraints on stock prices within the context of stock market efficiency. While existing research has explored this relationship, inconsistencies persist in their findings. The purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive review of literature to elucidate the reasons behind these disparities.

A systematic review of existing theoretical and empirical studies was conducted following the PRISMA method. The analysis centered on discerning the factors contributing to the divergence in projected stock prices due to these constraints. Key areas explored included assumptions related to expectations homogeneity, revisions, information uncertainty, trading motivations and fluctuations in supply and demand of risky assets.

The review uncovered multifaceted reasons for the disparities in findings regarding the influence of short-sale constraints on stock prices. Variations in assumptions related to market expectations, coupled with fluctuations in perceived information uncertainty and trading motivations, were identified as pivotal factors contributing to differing projections. Empirical evidence disparities stemmed from the use of proxies for short-sale constraints, varied sample periods, market structure nuances, regulatory changes and the presence of option trading.

This study emphasizes the significance of not oversimplifying the impact of short-sale constraints on stock prices. It highlights the need to understand these effects within the broader context of market structure and methodological considerations. By delineating the intricate interplay of factors affecting stock prices under short-sale constraints, this review provides a nuanced perspective, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding in the field.

Globally, climate change governance continues to be a significant challenge to policymakers, environmentalists and politicians despite international summits, conferences and programmes designed to find sustainable solutions to the climate change crises. Climate change continues to be viewed primarily as a challenge for the future, whereas many leaders and administrators globally regard it as an environmental issue rather than a challenge that encompasses all aspects of life. In South Africa, these misleading perceptions of climate change continue to prevail both at national and local levels. The government and private organisations do not attach the required levels of urgency needed to address the climate change crisis. While numerous policies and institutions have been established to address these challenges, they lack financial backing, coordination and synergy that cut across the broad objectives of environmental, social and economic agendas. Additionally, weak, eroding trust and manipulating of institutions continue to hinder effective policy implementation and focus-driven governance. This paper aims to explore the structural and governance weaknesses of climate change administration in the KwaZulu-Natal province and South Africa in general.

This paper used extensive literature reviews and a triangulated approach to investigate the weaknesses of the current governance structure in the context of institutional and capacity constraints.

The findings uncovered that most institutions and organisations mandated to address climate change challenges operate in silos, lack required investment and capacity and have weak accountability mechanisms with a shallow understanding of climate change governance.

This paper recommends better coordination between national, provincial and local governments as well as the private sector towards climate change activities and capacity to ensure that climate change actions are effectively implemented.