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Considering the growing importance of finance in shaping corporate and human activities, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System that aims to align the financial system with sustainable development, with a focus on environmental aspects. Following the inquiry call for better disclosure approaches of material information on the “sustainability impacts” of the financial system as one of the areas of improvement to move toward a sustainable financial system, the author argues for a reform of the accounting model to better reflect the compliance of businesses with “quality of growth” imperatives.

The paper rests on the entity theory of Littleton (1934).

The new accounting model requires creating a new equity capital account for the entity that is separate from the shareholders equity account. Valuation as well as other related issues on the functioning of this account is briefly explored in the paper. The reform also requires entrusting the responsibility of answering questions related to valuation, capital maintenance and income distribution to the board of directors that should be composed of representatives of the different capitals which have accrued, temporarily or indefinitely, to the business firm.

This paper calls researchers to explore the theoretical avenues proposed in the paper to develop the model in practice.

The implementation of this reform requires a regulatory reform and the redesign of the economic coordination mechanisms which could be challenging in practice.

The accounting model proposed in the paper contributes to a new quality of growth, which is a growth based on well-being and inclusiveness.

The paper draws on the UNEP framework, which has not been investigated in other research studies.

As a crucial institutional form established since the Chinese economic reform, the system of competitive local governments has been shaping the characteristics of China's socialist market economy to a considerable degree.

This study not only adopts the view of existing studies that attribute the economic motive of local governments to rent and consider land public finance as a means through which local governments carry out strategic investment but also attempts to further develop the view within a Marxist analytical framework.

As a result, the local governments have helped to maintain an incredibly high investment rate over a considerable period of time, facilitating the continuous, rapid growth of the Chinese economy.

This study concludes that China's local governments function as the productive allocator and user of rent in the strategic investment based on land public finance and thereby embed themselves in the relative surplus-value production initially arising from competition amongst enterprises, forming the dual structure of relative surplus-value production unique to China's economy.

There exist long-term fluctuations in the process of capital accumulation. The economic long wave is an essential part of research into non-mainstream western economics. After the Second World War, the capitalist world experienced the fourth long wave of expansion and then entered into a downward phase of the long wave in the 1970s. Regarding to whether a new long wave of expansion took place in the 1980s, left-wing scholars hold different viewpoints. The purpose of this paper is to focus on this issue.

First, based on the review of the long wave history, this paper discusses three kinds of long wave theories with significant influence and puts forward the theoretical framework of analyzing the long wave of capitalist economy. Next, under the guidance of this theoretical framework and in combination with the actual development and evolution of the capitalist economy, the issue of whether the fifth long wave of the capitalist economy began to emerge in the 1980s is discussed deeply.

This paper argues that, from the early 1980s to 2007, the US-dominated developed countries experienced a new long wave of expansion driven by the information technology revolution, the adjustment of the neoliberalism system and the economic globalization. However, the financial-economic crisis of 2008–2009 led to a new phase of long wave downswing.

This paper does not agree with the single-factor analysis of the intrinsic formation mechanism of economic long wave and sticks to the multi-factor analysis centering on the fluctuation of accumulation rate. It is pointed out that the evolution of the long wave of capitalist economy depends on the combined influence of technology, institutions and market. The study of the long wave of the economy will help us to correctly understand the historical stage and characteristics of the current world capitalist economy in the long-term fluctuations, so that we can make an appropriate and positive response.

The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the economic interdependence can affect the likelihood of conflict between States. Specially, over the past few decades, there has been a huge interest in the relationship between economic interdependence and political conflict. Liberals argue that economic interdependence lowers the possibility of war by increasing the weight of trading over the alternative of aggression; interdependent states would rather trade than invade; realists dismiss the liberal argument, arguing that high interdependence increases rather than decreases the probability of war. In anarchy, states must constantly worry about their security.

This paper highlights the content and level of economic interdependence between China and the USA since the beginning of China’s economic reform in 1979 and examines the impact of economic interdependence between them on their relationship toward Taiwan since 1995 and the probability of conflict.

Economic interdependence is proved to significantly decrease the onset of conflict between the two parties. This can be shown by comparing the number of armed conflicts during the pre-interdependence period to the number of armed conflicts after the economic interdependence there was an overage of 0.79 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs)/year, compared to 0.26 MIDs/year following China’s economic reforms; also, the length of the hostilities was longer during the pre-interdependence period (with an average of 11.13 months versus 5.33 months).

This means that economic interdependence does not completely prevent the outbreak of international conflicts, but it also plays a major role in influencing the conflict in terms of the conflict’s intensity, the use of armed force and the number of conflicts that occur between the economic interdependence states.

This paper aims to provide an economic rationale for Islamic finance.

Its methodology is simple. It starts with listing the contributions to economic analysis relevant to the required rationale in the theories of banking, finance, price, money and macroeconomics, to identify the main rationale for Islamic finance. A concise description of the author’s model for an Islamic economic system, within which Islamic finance can be operational, is provided.

The paper finds distinct advantages of Islamic finance, when properly applied within the author’s model. Islamic finance can therefore be a candidate as a reform agenda for conventional finance. It opens the door for significant monetary reform in currently prevalent economic systems.

The first limitation of the paper is that the distinct benefits of Islamic finance are all of macroeconomic types which are external to Islamic banking and finance institutions. They are therefore not expected to motivate such institutions to apply Islamic finance to the letter, without regulators interference to ensure strict application. The second limitation is the necessity to set up enabling institutional and regulatory arrangements for Islamic finance.

The results are unique as they challenge the received doctrine and provide non-religious rationale for Islamic finance.

Starting from the theoretical mechanism of profit sharing between finance and the real economy, this paper reviews and analyzes the profitability of China's banking industry and makes a horizontal comparison with the banking industry of the United States, Japan, and Germany.

Based on the panel threshold model, it is found that there is a dual-threshold asymmetric effect between banking profit and the growth of real economy. When the net profit rate of the banking industry is lower than 0.491%, the increase in banking profitability will inhibit the growth of real economy due to profit grabbing; when the rate falls within the range of 0.491–0.801%, the increase in bank profitability is conducive to the growth of real economy.

Finance and the real economy are in the most comfortable symbiotic state; when the rate is higher than 0.801%, the continued increase in bank profitability will weaken the promotion effect of finance on the real economy, but bank profitability and the growth of real economy are still in a symbiotic state of positive promotion.

The promotion effect of China's bank profitability to the growth of real economy has shifted from the suboptimal state to the optimal range as a whole, which is attributed to the strong deleveraging and strict supervision of the Chinese government after 2016, the timely and decisive “stepping on the brakes”, pulling the financial sector back from the “illusion” caused by “self-circulated” profits and preventing it from harming the real economy.

The paper identifies the types of risks disclosed by Italian organisations using integrated reporting (IR). This paper aims to understand the level and features of risk disclosure with the adoption of IR.

The authors use risk classifications already provided in the literature to develop a content analysis of Italian organisations’ integrated reports published.

The content analysis reveals that most of the Italian organisations incorporate many types of risk disclosure into their integrated reports. Organisations use this alternative form of reporting to communicate risk differently from how they disclose risks in traditional annual financial reporting. That is, the study finds that the organisations use their integrated reports to disclose a broader group of risks, related to the environment and society, and do so using narrative and visual representation.

The paper contributes to a narrow stream of research investigating risk disclosure provided through IR, contributing to the understanding of the role of IR in representing an organisational risk.

It is widely believed that deviating from the “one share-one vote” principle leads to corporate inefficiencies. To measure the market appraisal of this potential inefficiency, this study aims to analyse the market reaction to a change from the “one head-one vote” to the “one share-one vote” mechanism by means of a quasi-natural experiment: a 2015 Italian reform forcing all listed cooperative banks to transform into joint-stock companies.

To investigate the market reaction around the regulatory change, this study uses both a traditional event study and a novel methodology based on the synthetic control method as well as on Bayesian statistical techniques.

This study estimates the market valuation of the effects of the governance change around the event date being equal to a cumulative average increase in market value of about 14 per cent using an event study methodology, and of about 13 per cent using Bayesian techniques.

This study provides evidence on the fact that the voting mechanism significantly affects the market values of companies. The study also introduces a novel statistical technique that can be extremely useful in analysing single-firm event studies.

This paper examines the impact of regional and non-regional trade on economic growth using annual data from Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member countries for the period 2007 to 2017.

Trade data were decomposed into regional (trade among ECOWAS Member States) and non-regional (trade between ECOWAS Member States and the rest of the world). We used the dynamic system GMM to estimate the models and introduced exchange rate, unemployment rate, population growth and gross capital formation as controlled variables.

The results revealed that the estimated coefficient of ECOWAS regional trade is statistically significant and positive in predicting growth, while the non-regional trade coefficient is negative and not statistically significant in predicting growth. Other predictors of growth introduced into the model as controlled variables, such as exchange rate, unemployment rate, population growth and gross capital formation, displayed mixed results. More importantly, population growth, unemployment and exchange rate depreciation hurt economic growth, while gross capital formation promotes economic growth.

The findings provide strong support in favour of the Krugman (1991) hypothesis that regional trade agreements (RTAs) are a better alternative to global trade.

Our decision to disaggregate ECOWAS trade is unique and influenced largely by the objective of the study, which is to establish the type of ECOWAS trade that is a good predictor of growth. The evidence from our findings support the theory that RTAs are a better catalyst to economic growth.

Over the past 20 years, China's infrastructure has developed at an extraordinary speed. The current literature mainly focuses on the effects of political incentives on the infrastructure. However, this paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime is an important clue and that the supernormal development of China's infrastructure is an explicable result for that.

This paper theoretically proves that in a politically centralized and economically decentralized economic entity with a public land-ownership regime, the self-financing mechanism formed by local officials through regulation of the land-grant price is the primary factor that influences the optimal supply volume of infrastructure in a region, in addition to political and economic incentives, and whether the self-financing mechanism can be formed or not depends on the structure of a country's land regime, which can help to explain the difference between the development of infrastructure in China and that in other developing countries from a theoretical angle.

The paper suggests that the mode is facing an important transformation toward land reform and new-type urbanization construction, and the replication and promotion of China's experience in infrastructure construction are of further significance under the Belt and Road Initiative as it provides a method for helping developing countries to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.

Through the test of multinational panel data, the paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime around 1990 had an overall effect on the supernormal development of infrastructure in China. The paper indicates that the “land-based development mode” of China's infrastructure indeed contributed to the supernormal development of infrastructure in China, but there are still some shortcomings in this mode.