Search results

The impact of diversification on bank stability and risk remains an ongoing topic of discussion with inconclusive results. Hence, this study investigated the implications of income diversification on bank stability within African markets.

The study utilised longitudinal financial data on 45 countries from 2000 to 2017 and employed static and dynamic panel model estimation.

The results of the study suggest income diversification technique could improve financial stability throughout typical and crisis periods which validate portfolio management theory. The study also confirms the “too big to fail” hypothesis, extensive diversifying over an optimal range negatively impacts stability. Banks with a high level of liquidity, a higher operating efficiency and a larger deposit ratio become more resilient. Banking capital regulations found to be the appropriate monitoring instrument for lowering risks and maintaining stability. However, profitability was found to have a positive effect on bank risk-taking. The finding also suggests that political institutions have substantial, direct implications that are positively related to bank fragility. Macroeconomic factors such as gross domestic product (GDP) growth and inflation also influenced bank stability.

This study has important implications for bankers, regulators and academicians concerned about the effect of diversification on a bank’s risk-taking or stability in developing economies.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study on Africa to analyse the quadratic influence of income diversification and the effects of political institutions on the level of bank stability.

The Nominal Group Process is one of a group of techniques that has been formulated to supplement the interactive group process. The NGP can be directly used to identify specific problems or areas of organisational concern. The technique has the secondary effect of facilitating overall communications (it begins to “break the ice” between participants). The structured format actually encourages participants to communicate, yet prevents those few participants from controlling the process. Because the NGP is so versatile, it is applicable in either simple problem identification or complex organisational development efforts.

The topic of ethics in government is hardly new. From Greek democracy to the current day, we have struggled to maintain morality and ethics in governing our societies and have failed to perfect a method.

The historian can provide quite a different explanation, other than the currently held views, for the emergence of the Red Terror in 1918.

Looks at the reasons for the collapse of both regimes and considers the importance of repression with these developments. Contrasts the methods of Imperial Russia with the Bolsheviks looking at Court proceedings, prison conditions, education and propaganda in prison, exile and the secret police. Concludes that whilst social support is usually seen as essential for survival of a system, repression is not regarded as a positive element but can become the method for a system’s survival and stability.

John Locke′s political economy lends itself to conservative, liberal and radical interpretations that frame the conceptual ambiguities that still shape our debates over government′s proper economic functions. Suggests that “masculinity” was a powerful undercurrent in Locke′s thought which linked these ambiguities and makes them explicable. In short, Locke′s political economy was a “gendered” one which juxtaposed Enlightenment hopes that “manly” men could balance freedom and equality, labour and prosperity, and political order, to ancient misogynist fears that “effeminate” men caused chaos when freed from political constraints. Ultimately, Locke′s scepticism resulted in a heavy investment in political prerogative which has been parlayed into twentieth century political hegemony.

History teaches that agreement about the distribution of valued things is seldom deep or widespread in large populations. When distributive issues rise to clear public consciousness, the tendency is towards civil strife. Stable democratic institutions are rarely the result of all or even most social actors cooperating voluntarily, peacefully and with adequate information; nearly always, they are the products of shrewd decisions made by those who are seriously influential – elites. Elites must trust each other to manage politics in ways that prevent distributive issues from reaching acute degrees that impel power seizures. But can elite trust be sustained in advanced post-industrial conditions? The question arises because of steadily declining needs for many kinds of work, exacerbated by large migrations from non-Western countries and a resulting insecurity that populists exploit divisively for political gain. They act as pied pipers offering delusive enticements, making irresponsible promises and exhibiting disdain for rule of law. Disinclined to deal realistically with, or even acknowledge, long-term post-industrial problems of work, populists erode elite trust and weaken the basis of stable democratic institutions.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.