The Shea butter industry in Nigeria is fragmented, private-driven and less regulated. This paper explores the roles, practices, and behaviour of local supply chain stakeholders who mainly consist of rural women entrepreneurs that engage in Shea nut picking and Shea butter processing. Also, the research examines the local buying agents (LBA) who serve as the middlemen between the rural women and the exporters of Shea butter. This study deploys qualitative research design, guided by the Role theory. The study reveals that the rural women and the local buying agents are the key stakeholders who participate in the agricultural supply chain. Granting the fundamental principle of the sustainable supply chain, the findings indicate that the present active engagement and practices of these local stakeholders do not align with the principles of the sustainable supply chain. The study also exposes that factors such as gender disparity, weak access to financial support, and information asymmetry are major contributors to the present roles, practices, and behaviour of the local actors. The current study, therefore, put forward several recommendations to the Nigerian Government to encourage the construction of sustainable engagement and sustainable supply chain in the rural supply chain network.

This research aims to examine the influence of the firm characteristics to tax avoidance activity in the listed companies in Indonesia. This research uses the proxies of firm size, leverage, capital intensity, inventory intensity as the firm characteristics and return on asset and market-to-book ratio as control variables. The samples of this research consist of 158 firm-year observations from all industries which are listed in Indonesia Stock Exchange during 2010-2013. The samples are selected by using purposive sampling method through several specific sample criteria. The technique used to examine hypothesis is multiple regression analysis. The result of this research reveals that leverage has a positive influence towards tax avoidance activity, while the rest variables have no influence towards tax avoidance activity.

The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which national culture is an explanatory variable for firm’s disclosure choices for sustainable development in the advanced, emerging and developing nations of the world, especially that entities interact in globally knowledge-based economies. A review of theoretical and empirical studies carried out on some developed, emerging and developing nations was undertaken with particular reference to traits characterised in specific national cultural environments about their effects on sustainability disclosures. The reviews show that not much work had been done in this area of study, in particular concerning social and environmental disclosures. Furthermore, studies are in the developed nations as compared with the emerging and developing economies. The studies reviewed focused more on cross-national design with less attention on the longitudinal aspect. It was not possible to review papers that were not written in English language, just as it is also important to state that, not all published works were reviewed, especially with access denied to some online. There is a need for more empirical evidence to further justify the relevance of this study area for global sustainability disclosures and development. The review adds value with the recognition of the need to gear up researchers and policy making bodies to encourage advancement of studies on the intellectual capital concept and resource-based value theory to enhance sustainability development globally.

Many companies are closing down after the global economic melt-down of 2008 that involved ERON. The biggest problem for such business failures as identified by practitioners and academicians is information asymmetry existing in the relationship of the managements with the shareholders. This study seeks to investigate how monitoring mechanisms influence the block-holders in 111 Nigerian non-financial listed companies to resolve this problem. The study also investigates the mediating effect of the quality-differentiated auditors on the relationship between block-holders and monitoring mechanisms. The investigation adopted quantitative analysis using Stata to test related hypotheses. The findings indicate that the block-holders significantly influence monitoring mechanisms. The results also reveal that quality-differentiated auditors positively affect monitoring mechanisms and that it significantly explains the relationship between block-holders and monitoring mechanisms. Thus, this paper adds to knowledge on the subject of monitoring mechanisms and its scopes (directorship, internal and external auditing). These findings have policy implications for the board of directors to execute their monitoring responsibilities and guide them in external audit type selection. The findings also provide policy suggestions for both the internal and external auditors. The results can also be beneficial for the regulatory agencies and government to further review the guidelines for corporate governance. The paper adds to knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially, Nigeria by examining a mediating effect to expose the relationship between block-holders and monitoring mechanisms, which are not clear or exist in the previous studies.

The purpose of this research is to examine the accuracy of the Altman Model and the Ohlson Model in Bankruptcy Prediction.The research population is all companies who are listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange. The sample of the research is 40 manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange in the period of 2010-2014 that are divided into companies with financial distress and those without financial distress.The data analysis technique is the Multiple Discriminant Analysis and Logit Analysis. The Multiple Discriminant Analysis is derived from the Altman Model while the Logit Analysis is derived from theOhlson Model. The results show that the Ohlson Model and the Logit Analysis are more accurate than the Altman Model and the Multiple Discriminant Analysis in predicting bankruptcy of manufacturing firms in the Indonesian Stock Exchange (BEI) in 2010-2014. Also, the results of the study reveal that the ratio of retained earnings to total assets; earning before interest and taxes to total assets; market value of equity to total liabilities; sales to total assets; and debt ratio, return on assets, working capital to total assets and net income were negative in the last two years. Hence constitutes the benchmark for consideration in determining the financial distress of a company.