Search results

In recent years, there have been calls on African countries to develop disaster governance system that recognises the complex nature of disaster events and reflects how their impact can prevent governments from achieving their development objectives. This chapter examines Ghana’s response to the calls by exhuming disaster management policies and the missing links in their implementation. This research was approached by comprehensively reviewing literature related to the subject. The review was supported by field-based interviews involving key stakeholders, some of whom are directly involved with disaster policy planning and implementation. The results show that even though there are several disaster management policies, they are fragmented and found within several institutions, a situation that has created some missing links in their implementation. For instance, poor collaboration and coordination among disaster management institutions hampered efforts towards disaster risk prevention, preparedness and mitigation which are viewed as cross-cutting themes in disaster management. Even more intriguing, critical stakeholders such as community groups who often play important roles in rescue and recovery operations and continue to render humanitarian services after official operations have ended are excluded from the everyday decision-making processes. Empirically, this chapter draws attention to how endogenous interventions that are deeply rooted in the culture of the people that could support well-crafted disaster legislations are often ignored. This chapter concludes that these missing links need to be addressed in order to make Ghana resilient to disaster.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of hedge fund activism (HFA) in preventing corporate policy deviations.

This paper identifies HFA interventions through a hand-collected sample of Schedule 13D filings between 1994 and 2016, and uses mechanical mutual fund fire sales as the instrument variable (IV) for the likelihood of such interventions. Armed with the instrument, this paper estimates firm's distribution, managerial compensation and investment policies in response to a change in the perceived likelihood of HFA interventions.

An increase in the HFA intervention likelihood leads to increases in shareholder distribution, decreases in CEO pay and investments and increases in operating performance. Compared to the sample average, a one standard deviation increase in the intervention likelihood leads to a 9.29% increase in the firm's payout ratio, a 7.42% decrease in CEO compensation, a 2.67% decrease in capital expenditures and a 4.96% decrease in R&D expenses. These changes are consistent with the threat of intervention curbing managerial empire-building behaviors and improving firm operation. The relationships are causal, significant and robust to a variety of alternative specifications and sample divisions.

Results of this paper suggest that as a mechanism for corporate governance, the threat of HFA is effective in preventing corporate policy deviations. They also demonstrate a stronger and broader impact of HFA on corporate policy than previously documented. By showing that HFA is an effective and viable mechanism for corporate governance, this study allows policymakers to make more informed decisions to whether increase hedge fund regulations or not.

The fragile states and stabilisation concepts appear to resonate with the concept of community resilience. Yet, there is barely a framework that integrates the three concepts. The authors posit that despite the increasing interest in community resilience in fragile states, there is much less clarity of resilience, fragility and stabilisation connections. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is based on the literature review of the concepts of community resilience, fragility and stabilisation.

The findings restate that the state fragility results from the breakdown of the social contract between the state and its citizens. Whilst both resilience and stabilisation are desirable constructs in reducing fragility, they should be broadly underpinned by agency not only to enhance preventive, anticipatory, absorptive and adaptive actions but also lead to social transformative capacity where agency is embedded for communities to exercise some sort of power to foster change.

This paper has encourages debate on resilience, fragility and stabilisation connections by suggesting framework for “doing” resilience-informed stabilisation programmes in fragile states. The framework, which may not necessarily be approached in a linear fashion, has three major components: identifying existing resilience factors, enhancing and sustaining these and delivering resilient communities. However, there is need to test the utility of the framework in practice.

The purpose of this study is to examine the spatial fluctuation spillover effect of green total factor productivity (GTFP) under the influence of Internet development.

Using panel data from 283 cities in China for the period 2003–2016, this paper explores the spatial fluctuation spillover effect of internet development on GTFP by applying the spatial autoregressive with autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model (SARspARCH).

The results of Moran's I test of the residual term and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) value indicate that the GTFP has a spatial fluctuation spillover effect, and the estimated results of the SARspARCH model are more accurate than the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model and the spatial autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (spARCH) model. Specifically, the internet development had a positive spatial fluctuation spillover effect on GTFP in 2003, 2011, 2012 and 2014, and the volatility spillover effect weakens the positive spillover effect of internet development on GTFP. Moreover, Internet development has a significant positive spatial fluctuation spillover effect on GTFP averagely in eastern China and internet-based cities.

The results of this study provide digital solutions for policymakers in improving the level of GTFP in China, with more emphasis on regional synergistic governance to ensure growth.

This paper expands the research ideas for spatial econometric models and provides a more valuable reference for China to achieve green development.

Consumarchy and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are two concepts related to the expanded scope of societal responsibility for the private sector. Since the postwar period, changes in the political, economic and technological spheres have been a source of major opportunities for global businesses, but at the same time the origin of new responsibilities. These concepts are evolving as part of a broader redefinition of global economy. This paper will attempt to examine and compare both concepts and their application in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses on the construction of a more fair and inclusive globalization. Both CSR and consumarchy share the idea that changes in corporate behavior resulting in the public good of social responsibility could be achieved through the market by embedding certain values or principles into the cost/benefit analysis of private companies. While consumarchy offers a systemic approach in which consumers play a central role, CSR is perhaps more delimited although it involves a wide range of actors. The paper will start with a description of consumarchy, its theoretical framework and the assumptions for its spread. Then, it will analyze CSR, its history, objectives, implementation and challenges. A comparison will be offered by way of a conclusion.

Destinations have in the scholarly literature been labeled as communities of interdependent organizations that collectively coproduce a variety of products and services. The paradigm comes close to describing destinations as firms which are embedded in interfirm networks. Recent studies provide crucial insights into an understanding of destinations' orchestration and structuration as coproducing interfirm networks. However, systematic knowledge about how these systems evolve and develop is lacking. This chapter addresses this issue and elaborates how the concepts of scale-free and small-world networks together can explain the process of destination evolution. The discussion also suggests how such theorizing can spur avenues for future research.

This chapter is a radical critique of the neoclassical growth theory, justifying ways out of mainstream economics. It has three parts. The first one analyzes growth theories from the Classical representation to the endogenous growth models. The second part demonstrates that the “new growth theory” is not a break with Solow's formalization. To prove it, we build an original Solowian endogenous growth model. Then, this neoclassical macrodynamic framework is technically, deeply critized in a third part. We show that both exogenous and endogenous neoclassical models prove to be incapable to explain growth in the long period. We concentrate on the ambiguities surrounding the hypothesis of single agent, as well as on the role of the state, in particular when it is considered as a “planner” by the neoclassicals. Endogenous growth models do not correspond to macrodynamization of the Walrasian general equilibrium, nor have solid microeconomic bases. We advocate in favor of rehabilitating state's intervention in social areas and of reactivating Marxist theoretical reflections regarding social planning and class analysis in the current time of structural crisis of the capitalist world system.

Higher education researchers are often challenged by the difficulty of empirically validating causal links posited by theories or inferred from correlational observations. The instrumental variable (IV) estimation strategy is one approach that researchers can use to estimate the causal impact of various higher education–related interventions. In this chapter, we discuss how the body of quantitative research specifically devoted to higher education has made use of the IV estimation strategy: we describe how this estimation strategy was used to address causality concerns and provide examples of the types of IVs that were used in various subfields of higher education research. Our discussion is based on a systematic review of a corpus of econometric studies on higher education–related issues that spans the last 30 years. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the use of IVs in quantitative higher education research and a discussion of good practices when using an IV estimation strategy.