The 2023 amendments to IAS 7 and IFRS 7 require buyers to disclose the liabilities covered by supplier finance arrangements, the part already paid to suppliers by finance providers, and payment-term ranges. Taking the disclosure objective of IAS 7.44F as the benchmark, this study asks whether these mandated quantities, as reported, are sufficient for like-for-like comparison across companies without further reconciliation by the analyst. Using the 2024–2025 consolidated reports of five European consumer groups (Carlsberg, Haleon, Heineken, Nestlé and Unilever) as critical cases, it identifies four comparability failure modes. First, payment-term formats differ: Heineken reports an identical 7–180-day range inside and outside its arrangements alongside an 8–11-day gap in weighted averages, and Nestlé’s monetary buckets show about 53 percentage points more balances beyond 120 days inside the arrangement than outside it. Second, the choice of numerator matters: scaling covered rather than paid liabilities by trade payables reverses the Heineken–Unilever ranking in both years, the only reversal among the ten possible pairs. Third, the scope of the denominator is not disclosed: for Nestlé, three defensible payables bases put the paid-financing ratio between 23.1% and 35.6% and make Nestlé’s first place on coverage depend on the assumed payables base. Fourth, whole-million rounding leaves the smallest programme impossible to rank. The study proposes a diagnostic sequence for analysts and identifies disclosures that would remove the ambiguity; it shows that these failures can occur, not how frequent they are.
This study examines whether Moroccan agricultural small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) adjust their leverage toward a target capital structure and estimates the speed of adjustment. Drawing on the dynamic trade-off perspective and the partial-adjustment framework, this study uses a balanced panel of 54 Moroccan agricultural SMEs observed from 2017 to 2022, yielding 324 firm-year observations. The empirical analysis employs the Arellano–Bond Difference Generalized Method of Moments (GMMs) estimator to account for the dynamic nature of leverage and potential endogeneity. The results reveal significant leverage persistence, with the coefficient on lagged total leverage estimated at 0.6155 (p < 0.01). The implied annual speed of adjustment is 38.45%, suggesting that firms correct approximately 38% of the deviation between observed and target leverage over one year. The corresponding model-implied half-life is approximately 1.43 years. These findings provide evidence consistent with partial adjustment toward target leverage among Moroccan agricultural SMEs and offer insights into the dynamics of their financing decisions.
This paper examines the organizational and financial capacity of Croatian cultural-sector organizations to access and manage European Union (EU) project funding. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was applied, combining a survey of 81 organizations with semi-structured interviews with 11 managers of public cultural institutions, conducted immediately before and during the earliest phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil society organizations reported significantly more submitted project applications and successfully implemented EU-funded projects than public cultural institutions. Exploratory regression models indicated that project-related knowledge was associated with application activity, whereas organizational revenue was associated with the number of successfully implemented projects. The interviews suggest that limited human resources, insufficient project-related knowledge, administrative complexity, and difficulties in securing co-financing and pre-financing constrain the participation of public cultural institutions. From a sustainable finance perspective, these constraints may increase financial and implementation risks and limit funding diversification. The findings point to the potential value of targeted capacity building, simplified administrative procedures, and predictable co-financing and pre-financing mechanisms, which could strengthen the financial resilience of cultural institutions and reduce their dependence on a single source of public funding, which can potentially strengthen their long-term financial sustainability.
The growing importance of identifying environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks is driven by increasing regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations. However, information asymmetry, disclosure–performance gaps and potential greenwashing may limit the reliability of sustainability disclosures. This study examines the potential of financial statements as an additional source for screening ESG risk exposures and proposes an ESG Proxy Mapping Approach based on financial statement indicators. The empirical analysis covers companies listed on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (68 in total), combining content analysis of publicly available financial and non-financial information with quantitative proxy indicators, comparative analysis and cross-report verification. The findings indicate that the feasibility of identifying potential signals varies across indicators, companies, and sectors. Proxies based on conventional accounting items tend to be more observable than those that require disclosing ESG-specific amounts. However, the mere existence of an observable accounting item or computable ratio does not establish an ESG-related cause. Missing disclosures also constrain the assessment. The findings suggest that, when combined with contextual disclosure analysis, financial-statement-based proxy mapping can support preliminary ESG risk screening, but cannot independently confirm the existence or magnitude of ESG risks.
The COVID-19 pandemic depressed household income and firm revenue, transmitting a broad real shock to bank loan portfolios. This study asks whether the composition of bank assets conditioned that transmission. Using data for 344 commercial banks in 47 African countries over 2010–2021, we estimate a difference-in-differences model comparing banks that entered the pandemic with above-median asset diversification against their less diversified peers. Unlike existing work, which relies on non-interest income, we measure diversification from the composition of the balance sheet, since several components of non-interest income are themselves generated by lending. Credit risk rose during the pandemic, and more diversified banks experienced a smaller increase in both non-performing loans and loan loss reserves. The result is robust to propensity-score matching and a placebo test; for loan loss reserves it also survives country-by-year fixed effects, pre-trend corrections and a continuous treatment, whereas for non-performing loans it loses precision once country-level shocks are absorbed. The effect does not reflect larger securities holdings or a flight to safety. The evidence is consistent with asset diversification acting as a buffer under a sectorally uneven real shock, and suggests that supervisors in bank-based emerging economies may usefully treat balance-sheet composition as a dimension of resilience.
