Suchergebnisse

South African municipalities have been plagued by poor service delivery, with many communities experiencing inadequate access to basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, and waste removal. Despite the country's progressive constitutional and legislative frameworks, the root causes of poor service delivery are complex and multifaceted. This study aims to explore the underlying reasons for service delivery challenges in South African municipalities, specifically focusing on the interplay between poor governance and structural and systematic factors. In other words, the study aims to identify and unpack the complex interplay between governance factors (such as corruption, political interference, and lack of accountability); structural factors (such as resource constraints, inadequate infrastructure, and capacity challenges); and systematic factors (such as historical legacies of apartheid, urban-rural divides, and socio-economic inequalities). The study employs a qualitative research approach, using document analysis to gather data. The data were analysed using thematic content analysis to identify the key themes and patterns that emerged from the data. The study draws on the New Public Management and Public Choice Theories to gain insights into the factors affecting service delivery. The findings highlight poor governance, urbanisation, corruption, political-administrative interference, political instability, and internal conflicts as major contributors to service delivery challenges in South African municipalities. Lastly, the study puts forth several recommendations to address these issues, including strengthening good governance and leadership, enhancing citizen participation, improving financial management, enhancing human resource capacity, fostering intergovernmental collaboration, reducing political-administrative interference, combating corruption, and addressing the impact of rapid urbanisation to promote sustainable service delivery.

Purpose
This study aims to explore how females on committees (FOC) and committee ethnic diversity (CED) impact environmental, social and governance performance (ESGP).


Design/methodology/approach
This study examines 126 listed firms under the coverage of FTSE ESG Ratings in Bursa Malaysia between 2017 and 2019. This study applies partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the hypotheses. While the risk of common method variance is minimised using multiple data sources for the analysis, instrumental variable-free approach, i.e. Gaussian copula method which is implemented in SmartPLS 4.0 has been used to address the potential endogeneity of the model.


Findings
Empirical evidence demonstrates significant positive direct relationships between FOC and ESGP, as well as CED and ESGP. The argument of resource dependence theory and positive empirical results on the two direct relationships hold firm despite several committees being aggregated as one construct with the aim of providing different insights into the literature.


Practical implications
This study provides implications for firm leadership to consider reviewing the composition of committees by increasing female representation while striking a balance in the appointment of committee members of different ethnicities to enhance firm ESGP.


Originality/value
To the best of the author's knowledge, this study adopts a holistic approach by capturing, for the first time, the female representation of audit, nomination, remuneration and risk management committees. These dimensions are further developed into a single quantifiable variable, presented as FOC. Similarly, the ethnic diversity of the respective committees is aggregated and developed into a single quantifiable construct: the CED. Unlike most existing studies that commonly use econometric software, the application of PLS-SEM in this study contributes to the limited body of corporate governance and ESG studies that use PLS-SEM.

The labor movement has long had an ambivalent relationship to antitrust policy in the United States. Trade unionists have considered concentrated markets to be more favorable environments for union power than decentralized markets: oligopoly demands fewer union resources for organizing and contract bargaining campaigns, and oligopolists can tame cutthroat competition and share product market rents with workers. This article takes a different view. Looking to the strategies employed by unions in decentralized industries, where unions rather than corporations took on the role of taming and regulating competition, it explains how unions have leveraged power over market governance into bargaining power over wages and working conditions. In the current age of vertical disintegration and fissured workplaces, union power over market governance is more important to shop-floor power than ever. Antitrust policy is one tool that can help restrain the power of corporations and make them more accountable to workers' collective power.

The objective of this research is to investigate the potential moderating role of ISO14001 in the relationship between corporate governance and firm financial performance. Corporate governance is measured using four dimensions, the variable considered in this analysis encompass board size, frequency of board meetings, gender diversity within the board, and the presence of independent non-executive directors. The assessment of financial performance involves both accounting-based and market-based metrics. The results of this study are obtained from annual company reports, and the study employs purposive sampling with a sample size of 70 manufacturing firms from the PXS 100 index. The empirical findings indicate that CG has a positive significant influence on both ROA and Tobin's Q. Additionally, ISO14001 significantly moderates the relationship between CG and FP.

This article reviews the state of the literature on the politics of global health governance and associated political dynamics of actors involved in this issue space. We identify seven eras in the field, beginning with the period of empire and colonialism and ending with the COVID-19 outbreak. The field of global health has long had a focus on infectious disease, often rooted within a state-centered approach to transnational global health problems with recurrent debates about whether and how restrictions on trade and travel should be imposed in the wake of disease outbreaks. This statist focus is in tension with more cosmopolitan visions of global health, which require broader health system strengthening. In the mid-2000s, a golden age emerged with the influx of new financing and political attention to addressing HIV/AIDS and malaria, as well as reducing the risk posed by infectious disease outbreaks to economies of the Global North. Despite increased awareness of noncommunicable diseases and the importance of health systems, events of recent years (including but not limited to the COVID-19 outbreak) reinforced the centrality of states to global health efforts and the primacy of infectious diseases.

Purpose
Using system theory, this paper aims to interrogate the impact of Boko-Haram on bank administration. The paper explains how death, injury and property destruction caused by terrorism affect banking supervision and structures.


Design/methodology/approach
With the aid of a mixed research method, this paper conducted 47 interviews. It extracted secondary data from the Central Bank of Nigeria database, the National Deposit Insurance Corporation publications, Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access Survey, the World Bank database and the Global Terrorism Index. Descriptive, content and regression analysis was used in this research.


Findings
With a significant regression model (p-value < 0.05), the analysis shows that terrorism accounts for 84.02% variation in banking administration. The impact of Boko-Haram on banking administration is negatively significant, especially in the areas like on-site supervision of Money Deposit Banks/Micro-finance Institutions and citizens' accessibility to financial systems.


Originality/value
This paper generates new knowledge in the thematic area, which is still grey. The influence of terrorism on financial institutions as an element of economic governance is less researched. Hence, the strategic linkage of the impact of Boko-Haram on banking administration as a component of financial institutions. Therefore, this paper contributes to the existing body of literature on terrorism and economic governance.

During periods of uncertainty, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the significance of Corporate Governance (CG) practices is highlighted. The study aims to evaluate the adoption of CG practices in companies listed on the Slovak capital market, with a specific focus on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The data were collected manually from the annual reports of these companies, and covered the period from 2016 to 2021. The Corporate Governance Index, which is developed through Saaty's method, is used to evaluate the overall level of CG implementation. Individual components of the CG Index are also examined. Between 2016 and 2021, the majority of the examined CG criteria and the overall CG Index showed improvement as compared to 2011 - 2015. However, currently, nearly 50% of companies do not disclose information on corporate governance, remuneration, and risk management, and many companies have not succeeded in establishing nomination and remuneration committees or making any progress in terms of board gender diversity. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a moderate impact on some criteria. On the one hand, the information on board member remuneration and risk management has moderately deteriorated. On the other hand, the audit committee has shown improvement. Nevertheless, the pandemic has not significantly affected the overall adoption of CG practices in Slovak companies.

Social movements see participation formats of international organizations (IOs) with suspicion. They increasingly retreat from cooperation to contest IOs from the outside, because they fear co-optation without real policy impact. However, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was an exception to this trend because its opening up was seen as long-term dialogue facilitating discussions about the nature of food production, and because it created credible institutional mechanisms that were trusted by activists to give influence to farmers and peasant movements. Therefore, the food sovereignty movement participated within the FAO framework in a remarkably institutionalized way throughout the 2010s. But in 2019, when the United Nations (UN) announced to hold a food systems summit (United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS)), this changed dramatically. The food sovereignty movement, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and eventually scientists, decided to boycott the summit, instead organizing an alternative Peoples' Summit, and withdrawing from long-held institutional roles in the FAO. How can this be explained? This article traces the process from the announcement of the UNFSS to its implementation, stressing how institutional trust was damaged by several decisions in the process that undermined the good faith of activists. As we show in detail, the circumvention of established institutional mechanisms, and the feeling of betrayal on the side of the movement, was decisive for losing institutional trust. Importantly, a mixture of substantive and institutional changes in the context of UNFSS not only undermined the movement's trust into the integrity and ability of the summit organizers, but thereby also provoked movement efforts to delegitimize UN food governance at large.

AbstractIn contemporary society, sumptuary laws regulate contested markets by delegating enforcement responsibilities to the private sector. This can decouple the intention behind policies from the practices to implement them. When state interests do not align concerning the legality of a market, can policy and practice recouple, and if so, how? This article reports on a case study of commercial cannabis in the United States to answer this question. Interviews with 56 cannabis industry stakeholders in California, Arizona, and Texas reveal that policy and practice recoupled through a patterned process that I call sumptuary administration. In each state, regulators drew on a unique set of schemas, or "framework of accountability," that prioritized a subset of cannabis market participants during the policy‐making process. This resulted in missing or ambiguous sumptuary laws. To address business challenges that were tethered to this regulatory environment, cannabis businesses drew on similar schemas to identify appropriate practices. I show how grounding practices in these frameworks legitimized the preferences of the cannabis industry in the eyes of state authorities and influenced specific program policy revisions. Sumptuary administration represents a novel mechanism for understanding the social construction of legality in markets that are regulated under fragmented governance.

AbstractThis paper empirically examines how a free market, a governance quality (GQ) and their interaction simultaneously affect income inequality in 23 Asian developing countries over the period 2000–2019. Especially, different dimensions of a free market proxied by various components of economic freedom (EF) are analysed. Results show that the overall EF and three of its components, including labour freedom, trade freedom and investment freedom, reduce income inequality; but other components, including business freedom (BF), monetary freedom (MF) and financial freedom (FF), widen income inequality. Meanwhile, the GQ not only decreases income inequality but also intensifies the beneficial impacts of the overall EF and those respective components of EF on income equality. Notably, at certain thresholds of GQ, the detrimental impacts of BF, MF and FF on income equality turn into the advantageous ones. The findings consolidate the appropriate combination of free market with specific dimensions and the GQ in boosting the equality of income distribution in Asian developing countries.