Global evidence on the selfish rich inequality hypothesis

We report on a study of whether people believe that the rich are richer than the poor because they have been more selfish in life, using data from more than 26,000 individuals in 60 countries. The findings show a strong belief in the selfish rich inequality hypothesis at the global level; in the majority of countries, the mode is to strongly agree with it. However, we also identify important between- and within-country variation. We find that the belief in selfish rich inequality is much stronger in countries with extensive corruption and weak institutions and less strong among people who are higher in the income distribution in their society. Finally, we show that the belief in selfish rich inequality is predictive of people’s policy views on inequality and redistribution: It is significantly positively associated with agreeing that inequality in their country is unfair, and it is significantly positively associated with agreeing that the government should aim to reduce inequality. These relationships are highly significant both across and within countries and robust to including country-level or individual-level controls and using Lasso-selected regressors. Thus, the data provide compelling evidence of people believing that the rich are richer because they have been more selfish in life and perceiving selfish behavior as creating unfair inequality and justifying equalizing policies.

Determining the economic impact of cryptocurrency adoption on international trade from a gravity model framework

As cryptocurrencies develop and circulate at greater rates, countries have appeared to consider the technology as an adoptable medium of exchange. By expanding the influence of cryptocurrencies through adoption, countries raise its impact on the global economy. This paper is the first to apply an augmented version of the gravity model to examine the effects of global cryptocurrency adoption on international trade. This empirical study involves aggregating datasets on U.S. bilateral trade flows, gravity variable statistics, and the adoption of cryptocurrencies. In application of the gravity model, regression analyses are used on the aggregated data to test the magnitude of cryptocurrencies’ impact on trade. Based on the overall findings, the variables for cryptocurrency adoption produce negative coefficients suggesting a negative correlation between the adoption of cryptocurrencies and international trade. The central tendency in the empirical evidence offers the interpretation that countries with weak institutions to promote trade are more likely to adopt cryptocurrencies resulting in a negative association between cryptocurrency adoption and trade.

Careers of commercially successful female entrepreneurs in context of underdeveloped markets and weak institutions

PurposeCareers have come to dominate contemporary discourse on gendered entrepreneurship. This paper aims to explore entrepreneurial careers as recounted by commercially successful female entrepreneurs to examine how they strategize to construct desirable careers in contexts characterized by underdeveloped markets and weak institutions.Design/methodology/approachUsing a qualitative research design, data for our inquiry come from publicly available life history accounts of 20 female entrepreneurs appearing on an enterprise focus television show in Nigeria. The authors supplemented the television interview data with archival data in the form of publicly available digital footprints of the entrepreneurs collected from their company websites, magazines, online newspapers featuring these entrepreneurs and their social media pages such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Facebook and Instagram.FindingsThe careers of female entrepreneurs operating in context of underdeveloped institution and markets, the authors found, are characterized by four heterogeneous ingrained dispositions and actions reflecting how they got in and got on with their entrepreneurial careers: (1) “Observing and playing business,” (2) traipsing the “path less traveled,” (3) a hook to the “Pierian spring” of entrepreneurship and (4) “Grace under pressure” in decision-making.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by providing insight into the lived experiences, agency and careers of commercially successful female entrepreneurs as played out in the form of a contextual practice of “wayfinding” to starting up and managing their own business ventures.

Anti-corruption

Representing at least five percent of world GDP, corruption is a great challenge in general, and especially associated with sustainable business, both nationally and internationally. In this chapter, I reflect on how to address corruption and anti-corruption practices. Typical forms of corruption include bribery, facilitation payments, gifts, hospitality and expenses, political contributions, charitable contributions, sponsorships, voluntary community contributions, trading in influence, and conflict of interest and impartiality. Corruption leads to weak institutions and injustice, less respect for rights, denial of basic services, and several of the world’s environmental damage and tragedies are associated with corruption. Studies show that almost half of the companies have experienced fraud over the past two years. This chapter addresses the corruption challenges, how they are addressed by corporations and key international laws as well as challenges associated with norms and behaviors. How to detect and avoid corruption receives key attention. As anti-corruption is a huge topic and challenge, and only limited space is available in the book, the topic is presented from a more general perspective. Even though anti-corruption is often left out when talking about sustainability, it cannot be excluded from a book on sustainability and responsibility.

Weak Institutions and Poor Governance in Nigeria: A Socio-Legal Perspective

The Nigerian state as a governance template has been dominated by the vexatious problem of underdevelopment since post-colonial history. Good governance and development as an intertwine concept have largely been elusive, rather, poor governance has dominated the Nigerian society, resulting from leadership problems, pervasive corruption, the existence of multiple centres of loyalty base regime, ethnic and religious interest among others, all indicative of weak, underperforming or non-performing institutions of government. This paper made an in-depth inquiry into the correlation between weak institutions and poor governance, highlighting the Nigerian situation. It critically analyzed the concept of good governance as the opposite of poor governance. This paper found that unless the Nigerian state cures itself of the malaise of weak institutions and procures a situation where both the leaders and the led imbibe the ethos of good governance, it will continue to struggle with the burden of poor governance and the concomitant lack of social development it breeds in the society.

Movers, Motives, and Impact of Illegal Small-Scale Mining: A Case Study in Ghana

This research unravels the agents and driving motivation behind the rise of illegal small-scale mining in Ghana and its impact. This is accomplished via a qualitative study using illegal small-scale mining in the Talensi and Nabdam districts of Ghana as a case study. At the forefront of this phenomenon are rent-seeking elites, whereas structural factors such as rising unemployment and high population growth, as well as opportunistic factors including low barriers to entry, get-rich quick syndrome, and political corruption/weak institutions are fueling it as well. Although there are some economic benefits of illegal small-scale mining, these benefits are undermined by factors associated with the Resource Curse Hypothesis (RCH) or the ‘Paradox of Plenty.’ We argue that most illegal small-scale mining communities are characterized by increased rent-seeking activities by diverse stakeholders particularly the elites, poor investments in human capital development, and weak institutional structures and processes. To sustainably address the illegal small-scale gold mining menace in Ghana, all efforts should be aimed at holistically dealing with the rent-seekers, especially the elites involved, eliminating their motives and removing the conditions that facilitate their involvement.

Conclusions

There are three central interlinked areas of economic and social life of significance for Bambara farming households in Kala: annual millet production, returns from various investments – wells, plough-teams, breeding cattle - and longer term returns from child-rearing, marriage and household management. Success in each field reinforces success in the other two fields as, for example, when a good millet harvest can fund another marriage which will generate a replenishment of labour in the longer term. People face highly variable returns to farming and investment, and must continually react to changing climatic and economic circumstances, by altering patterns of crop production and investment. Some households do better than others, since their scale and strategy enable them to deal with uncertainty, and risks. Equally, mastery of a successful investment portfolio enables a household to re-invest surplus in marriage and expansion of the domestic group, ensuring greater resilience to future shocks, especially demographic. Nevertheless, there are certain forces operating at higher level - environmental trends, weak institutions, poor governance of land – which are difficult for Kala’s farmers to address.

Weak Institutions and Persistence of Slums in Bihar, India

This study endeavours to answer two questions: (a) why do slums persist? and (b) How can we transform slums into better living space? Small city slums have been largely overlooked in the existing literature on urbanization. The study utilises primary data collected from 184 households and focus group discussions conducted in nine different slums of Gaya, a small city of Bihar in India. Econometric results reveal that perceived legal ownership, prolonged stay at the same location, income and education facilitate the dissolution of slum attributes, as defined by UN-Habitat. Our results also suggest that although patronage associated with corruption within the local formal governance enables reduction of slum characteristics, but discriminatory allocation of public resources contributes to their persistence. The paper suggests that strengthening of security of land tenure, improvement in local governance and adoption of income and human capital augmenting measures can act as potential catalyst towards the endeavour to de-slum a city.

Comment letters on annual reports: Evidence from an emerging market

This paper examines comment letters on firms’ annual reports in an emerging market. The literature primarily focuses on comment letters issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), although many other market regulators also use SEC-style comment letters. Comment letters can potentially be very impactful in emerging markets due to weak institutions and low disclosure quality in these markets. Using comment letters in China from 2015 to 2019, I find that the market response to the receipt of comment letters is significantly negative and associated with the severity of the comment letters. The receipt (severity) of comment letters is associated with adverse regulatory consequences, CEO turnover, corrective actions to remedy financial reporting, and poor future financial performance in the propensity score matched sample (recipient sample). Overall disclosure quality in the post-review year does not increase, but some comment letter topics prompt topic-specific financial reporting changes.