Emmanuel Opoku Marfo

The effect of herd formation among healthcare investors on health sector growth in China

BackgroundChina has become the world‘s second largest healthcare market based on a recent report by the World Health Organization. Eventhough China achieved universal health insurance coverage in 2011, representing the largest expansion of insurance coverage in human history achieved; health inequality remains endemic in China. Lessons from the effect of market crisis on health equity in Europe and other places has reignited interest in exploring the potential healthcare market aberrations that can trigger distributive injustice in healthcare resource allocation among China’s provinces. Recently, many healthcare investors in China have become more concerned about capital preservation, and are responding by abandoning long term investments strategies in healthcare. This investment withdrawal en mass is perceived to be influenced by herding tendencies and can trigger or consolidate endemic health inequality.MethodsOur study simultaneously employs four testing models (two state spaced models and two return dispersion models) to establish the existence of procyclical (herding) behavior among the stocks and its health equity implications. These are applied to a large set of data to compare and contrast results of herd formation among investors in fourteen healthcare sectors in China.ResultsThe study reveals that apart from the cross sectional standard deviation (CSSD) model, the remaining two models and our augmented state space model yields significant evidence of herding in all subsectors of the healthcare market. We also find that the herding effect is more prominent during down movements of the market.ConclusionHerding behavior may lead to contemporaneous loss of investor confidence and capital withdrawal and thereby deprive the healthcare sector of the much needed capital for expansion. Thus there may be obvious delay in efforts to bridge the gap in access to healthcare facilities, medical support services, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, diagnostic substances, medical laboratory and advanced medical equipment across China. Moreover, a potential crash in the healthcare market is possible in the healthcare sector as a result of persistent herding tendencies among investors and that may have more damaging consequences for health inequality in China.

Corporate Social Responsibility: Institutional Behavior Differences in Extractive Industry

The developed countries’ institutional research undertaken on corporate social responsibilities (CSR) have shown a positive relationship between accessibility of financial related assets and CSR. Contentions that we classified as the Institutional Difference Hypothesis (IDH) drawn from the institutional writing, on the other hand, propose that institutional contrasts amid of developing and the developed economies are prone to result in diverse CSR propositions. Incorporating the rationale of IDH with understanding of knowledge from slack resource theory, we contend that there exists a negative relationship between fiscal resources accessibility and CSR investments for mining companies in Ghana, a sub-Saharan African developing economy. We utilize a well-protected data from the Ghana Investment Promotion Center (GIPC), Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) and Ghana Chamber of mines (GCM) and find that Return on Ordinary Share, Return on Sales, and Net Profit were reliably connected with lower CSR disbursements. We highlight the ramifications of our discoveries for academics’ examination and corporate practitioners.

Achieving a Sustainable Business: The Role of Environmental Management Accounting in Corporate Governance

This paper establishes the relevance of Environmental management accounting (EMA) as an inevitable system for ensuring effective corporate governance. In contemporary business, corporate leaders globally stress on ensuring the interest of stakeholders through diverse means of which the use of Environment management accounting systems could be adopted for that purpose. Reluctance in handling environmental issues could culminate into huge financial loss to organizations in terms of environmental or other opportunity costs. It could also be the source of loss of goodwill on the part of stakeholders which can spell huge consequences for the entity’s business relationships resulting into governance problems. Consequently, the paper suggests that there are several reasons by which environmental management accounting becomes inevitable in the corporate governance process. It further concludes that Environmental management accounting provides information to the CEO that enables companies improve upon their environmental performance which impacts on effective corporate governance. The paper finally suggests specific areas for future research in relation to EMA and corporate governance.

The Antecedents of Corporate Social Responsibility for Extractive Industries in the Governance Systems in Africa

The extractive industry gets huge international consideration because of the way they discharge their ecological and social obligations. Despite the fact that mining sector ventures have numerous points of interest, wrong mining operations have prompted emotional environment and resources exhaustion. To accomplish a parity of such operations, sustainable programs are an absolute necessity and ought to be trailed by the business. Of the different feasible practices, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) has picked up conspicuousness as of late. The developed nations, CSR is at a propelled level, yet in emerging economies particularly in Africa, CSR is in a preparatory stage, because of both known and obscure reasons. This study researches drivers for CSR usage in the mining business in Ghana, a developing country in Africa. A few studies concentrated on CSR issues however were constrained to industrial points of view without considering multi-partners. This paper endeavors to bridge the gap by dissecting CSR drivers from the viewpoints of numerous stakeholders, including media, government and social organizations. The researchers propose a model system, showed with a contextual investigation from a Ghana Investments Promotion Center (GIPC). In light of these findings, businesses can build their chances of honing quality CSR in modern business behaviors. This research augments the extent of this issue through changing multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) apparatuses and distinctive situations, for example, dim, fluffy, and different methodologies. The extra drivers can likewise be accepted with statistical interpretations.

Corporate Social Responsibility Behavior: Impact on Firm’s Financial Performance in an Information Technology Driven Society

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its impacts on financial performance has been studied exhaustively, however proponents reports differing findings. A number of studies have shown that there exist a significantly positive correlation between research and development (R&D) and profitability. Between the period 2009 and 2013, we analyzed 500 Ghanaian cases in which companies’ integrate R&D investments as one of their business sustainable development strategies for feasible advancement; they additionally recognize their altruistic “give-away” as commitments to CSR. In view of hypothetical affirmations and observational confirmation in this study, we recognized a positive relationship between CSR and financial performance.