The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of foreign finance inflows and economic performance on environmental degradation in Africa.The study was motivated by the quest to reexamine the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theory in 15 selected African economies by practically decomposing the total environmental effects of foreign finance into three strands, namely scale, technique, and composition effects.The panel dataset contained the 15 largest economies selected from the five regions of the African continent from 1990 to 2020 and ensured the used of 31 observations for each country.To simultaneously guarantee heterogeneity among the long-run and short-run coefficients, the study employed pooled mean group (PMG) estimator of the dynamic heterogeneous panel auto-regressive distributed lag (panel ARDL) model as its analytical technique.The study revealed that economic performance was negatively and positively related to environmental degradation in the short-run and long-run, respectively.This confirms the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic performance and environmental degradation and also validates the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis.Moreover, foreign finance was inversely related to environmental degradation, which implies that poor environmental quality cannot be directly linked to foreign capital inflows among the investigated countries.

Globally, businesses and corporate organisations are experiencing unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexities, and ambiguity (VUCA), which have made succeeding a herculean task. Therefore, how an organisation is managed, directed, and controlled—corporate governance has become a leading topic among stakeholders in the business world. This is because corporate governance effectiveness has been recognised as an indispensable factor in achieving sustainable long-term organisational success, irrespective of the sector, business model, and size. The board is the focal point of corporate governance, and it is responsible for its effectiveness through the board's oversight, leadership, strategic, and other functions. Overall, the state of many African Boards is not prosaic, and most African organisations struggle with running an effective board due to some cultural, economic, political, and legal factors on the continent. This chapter submits that corporate governance in Africa can be strengthened through legal and regulatory reforms; education and training; stakeholder engagement; auditing and monitoring; and meeting international standards and practising global best practices. However, African organisations seeking to run an effective board must focus on strategy, reinvention and innovation, technological adoption, and board assessment, amongst others.

International business research has provided substantial empirical evidence that foreign firms investing in countries with adverse environmental conditions may emerge as the main competitors in those countries. Against this backdrop, the dominance of local banks in Nigeria is puzzling. Our exploratory study, designed to investigate this inconsistency, revealed that managers of foreign and local banks perceive Nigeria’s environmental resources differently and, consequently, respond to them with different strategic choices that lead to different performance outcomes. Building on environmental psychology theory, we theorize the mechanisms by which foreignness affects perceptions and the ways in which these perceptions guide strategic choices. The study makes novel contributions to IB theory by blending insights from environmental psychology with theories of international business and employing individual-level analysis to supplement the firm-level analyses that have dominated preceding studies. The research enabled us to shed light on different explanatory variables than those commonly employed in international business research and to explain the puzzle that triggered our interest.

This study was aimed at examining the linkages between corruption, environmental sustainability, and economic performance.It was motivated by the quest to test the validity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in Nigerian.The EKC hypothesis explains the nexus between economic activities and environmental degradation.Therefore, this current study investigated the interconnections between corruption, environmental sustainability and economic performance in Nigeria using the modern Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) approach for the period from 1981 to 2020.The study revealed that corruption has negative and statistically significant effects on environmental quality and Nigeria's economic performance.In addition, the study showed that corruption has direct and indirect effects on environmental quality and asserted that corruption raises the level of C02 emissions and worsens the overall quality of environment, these empirical finding are in tandem with the postulation of the Environment Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis.This shows that economic performance responds to the changes in corruption and carbon emission in the long-run in a negative and statistically significant manner.Therefore, the concerned regulatory agencies must be strengthened to firmly address violators of environmental regulations and enhance energy efficiency.

It has become a truism that COVID-19 has impacted all countries and all people around the world, but in different ways. Yet this contextual diversity in the pandemic’s impacts, the responses by gov...

The chapter acknowledges a broad consensus following the recession of 2008 that ethically challenging practices have permeated the world of today’s businesses. Not only are the developing and emerging economies suffering from unethical corporate practices, they are also plagued by poor leadership. They also note that, in many cases, business leaders and entrepreneurs fail to understand their discretionary responsibilities to care for the ecosystem on which lives and businesses depend in enjoying the fruits of the free market and taking advantage of weak governance mechanisms and poor leadership, especially in the developing and emerging economies. The authors argue that the tenets of sustainability, which emphasizes the purpose of business as economic advancement coupled with concerns for socio-environmental well-being, offers some direction towards filling the ethical gap in management education to ensure sustainable development in the emerging economies. The chapter therefore examines how sustainability education can be more deliberately advanced in business and management education institutions in the emerging and developing countries.

Privately-owned Nigerian banks hold 94% of Nigeria banking assets, the world's second largest share of local ownership. Theoretical explanations for the dominance of local firms related to liabilities of foreignness do not explain this phenomenon, as foreign banks do not experience additional costs compared to local Nigerian banks. In search for explanation, we focus on market structure, competitive intensity and their impact on capability development. In-depth exploratory study of Nigeria banking industry, based on interviews with industry experts and practitioners, supplemented by secondary data, suggests that government policies towards both foreign and Nigerian banks resulted in market structure and competitive dynamics that were conducive to capability development by Nigeria banks, whose strength arrested foreign entry. The study throws light on a regulatory approach that incentivizes capability development via discipline imposed by markets rather than by direct government intervention in the form of protectionism or favorable resource provision. It highlights the merits of studying phenomena that are inconsistent with existing theories for theory extension and development.

This chapter presents a consequence need to be cognizant of the range of issues have to be considered when investigating board effectiveness in developing and emerging markets. The chapter also provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book considers the use of codes of behaviour and codes of conduct as mechanisms for improved board effectiveness. It highlights the distinctive character of boards in developing and emerging markets and that existing research has largely failed to accommodate this in prescriptive solutions. The book shows that concentrated ownership, through the state, can likewise undermine board effectiveness, and again, that the needed to be addressed if economic progress was to be sustained. It considers the importance of subsidiary firms having the same powers as their multinational parents. The book focuses on the potential of institutional shareholders to protect minority rights in developing and emerging markets and raised important questions for future research.

Though cross-border banking, stimulated by globalization and financial integration in the recent past, is said to offer growth-enhancing benefits such as competition and efficiency, financial inclusion, and diversification of risk, these benefits seem not to have materialized markedly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), an outcome attributable to efficiency barriers, currency differences, political instability, linguistic divisions, weak legal environment, and lack of regulatory coordination. However, given that many have flagged heterogeneity of regulatory architecture, inadequate institutional infrastructure, and other requisite environmental factors as more pivotal reasons for the delayed realization of cross-border banking’s many benefits in SSA, we invoke lessons from the Euro area’s successful experience in cross-border banking, to propose effective ways of harvesting its benefits in SSA. This paper, therefore, advances the initiation of a centralized regulatory authority as a potentially efficacious way of extracting fuller harvests from cross-border banking in SSA. More specifically, lessons from the Euro area suggest that strong collaboration among supervisors across SSA should be encouraged as to foster the establishment of a centralized regulatory authority for enabling successful cross-border banking and other financial services. Furthermore, the following regional initiatives can serve as robust antecedents of the centralized regulatory authority: single or more integrated regional markets, a regional deposit insurance scheme, and 1–2 dominant convertible currencies that can minimize exchange rate risks.

The study examines corporate governance practices and leadership in Nigeria. Corporate governance practices in Nigeria were critically discussed focusing on a number of challenges militating against good corporate practices in Nigeria which inter alias is leadership. The paper further examines the issue of corporate leadership, challenges and the roles it plays on corporate governance practices in Nigeria. In the same vein the paper also looked at the subject of board processes; board composition-selection process, diversity and federal character; and their impacts on the effectiveness of corporate leadership in Nigeria.

Foreign investment inflow, especially foreign direct investment (FDI) is perceived to have a positive impact on the economic growth and overall development of a recipient country through diverse direct and indirect channels. It complements local investment portfolio, which is essential in the attainment of sustainable growth and development. The African economies rely on FDI inflows from the developed countries for the attainment of the much desired sustainable growth and development in the region. Though the region has recorded some impressive growth in recent times, its ability to sustain it calls for concern. This is based on the fact that one of the growth enhancing factors in the region has unfortunately slumped since 2015. Available statistical evidence reveal that much of the countries in the region have been unable to attract adequate FDI in recent years. The objective of this paper is to determine the role of FDI inflows in enhancing sustainable development in the economy of Nigeria and Ghana. This paper therefore, adopts the multiple regression analysis with Ordinary Least Square (OLS) econometric technique on a time series secondary data from 2000 to 2018 obtained from WDI. Preliminary finding implies that Ghana performs better than Nigeria on social sustainability, which is measured in terms of education and healthcare indicators. However, on environmental and economic sustainability, Nigeria fares better than Ghana. These pre-estimation findings require further empirical inquiry. This implies that a per cent increase in FDI inflow to these countries enhances economic growth and economic sustainability by 0.3 per cent. However, we are quick to indicate that the positive impact is statistically insignificant. This reveals that the difference in economic growth and economic sustainability in both countries is not accounted for by FDI and gross fixed capital formation.

Environmental hostility is posited to halt firms’ development and growth. This leads to the expectations that foreign firms that developed their capabilities in more munificent environments and are able to draw on resources via their global network to compensate for local scarcity would emerge as the predominant competitors in hostile environments. The dominance of local banks of Nigeria’s banking industry conflicts this theoretical expectation. An exploratory study points at differences between foreign and local firms in their perception of Nigeria’s environmental conditions and their subsequent responses to environmental hostility. We use this insight to advance a typology of environmental hostility distinguished by the effectiveness of response mechanisms employed by local and foreign firms to confront it, and employ it to explain variations in the competitive outcomes between foreign and local firms across environments with different types of hostility.

Given that directors' have myriad roles to play towards enhancing good Corporate Governance practices, efforts must be made to highlight evaluation criteria towards assessing whether a director is effective or not, ditto for the entire board. With respect to selection and recruitment, this chapter, using the Independent Director Council's (IDC) framework, outlines the steps that must be taken to ensure proper selection of board members. After selection, the next step is integrating the new director into the board ('on-boarding') using some suggested procedures that can enhance soft landing for new directors. More importantly, regular and holistic evaluations for each board member must be done to determine each member's contribution. It is suggested that setting board objectives at the beginning of each year for ease of check-listing during the evaluation stage is vital. Finally, the various disengagement processes for an under-performing director is expatiated. Disengagement can come either in the form of resignation or termination. Before activating the termination option, the chairman, after the evaluation, should call on any board member that is not performing up to expectation and if need be allow him to undergo further training and participate in capacity development programmes.

The essence of formulating an effective strategy should be dependent on a company’s understanding of its operating environment. The implementation of a unique and effective strategy in an indigenous and competitive business environment will result in a competitive advantage. Drawing on the models that reduce uncertainty in business organisations, this chapter examines the dynamics of indigenous strategic management practices in Africa using Dangote Cement in Nigeria and Equity Bank in Kenya as case studies. The conceptual framework of this chapter presents the synthesis of strategic management practices in Africa; a global perspective and emphasis on Africa and as a result of which emerging organisations adopt these management practices and findings from both organisations. We discuss the tenacity of Dangote Cement entrepreneurial understanding of the Nigerian political, social and economic environment and its effective government relationship. This chapter examines the challenges and trends of strategic management practices in Africa and the key success factors in doing business in Africa, despite the depth of challenges in a business environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We discuss Equity Bank’s stakeholder management practices, strategic leadership and its inclusive business model, developed to enhance financial inclusion and access to available and attractive financial services for those at the bottom of the pyramid. Significantly, we argue that to succeed in Africa, businesses must understand the dynamics of strategic leadership, the cultural context of the operating environment, stakeholder management and include the social dimension of business in their business strategy.

While there is no doubt on the importance and contribution of the financial sector to economic growth, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is yet to reap the benefits of this sector. Focusing on the insurance subsector, this chapter argues that the current low penetration rate of about 2 percent can be attributed to the use of neo-liberal approach that ignores the contextual or institutional peculiarities of SSA. Thus, to enhance insurance penetration, the chapter proposes integrating both the formal and informal institutional peculiarities of SSA in the business model.