Adams Adeiza

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to assess how full-time tenured academic staff promotion practices (SPP) in Malaysian private universities (MPUs) influence academic staff engagement (SE) and academic staff performance (SP).Design/methodology/approach: The research used quantitative and descriptive methods, focusing on MPUs' academic staff as the unit of analysis. Sampling involved simple random and stratified techniques, with 314 academic personnel surveyed. Participant data was collected through a questionnaire, and study hypotheses were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) via a bootstrapping approach.Findings: The findings show that SE somewhat mediates the connection between SPP and SP and that SPP significantly influences SP.Practical implications: This study emphasizes the importance of impartiality and transparency within university administration when promoting academic staff. Universities should adopt modern strategies and approaches for advancing their employees to higher positions, doing so will motivate employees to fully invest in their work, leading to sustained high-performance levels.Originality/value: This research has substantially improved the understanding and the practical utilization of literature about SP, SPP and SE. This improvement can potentially facilitate the development of models, theories, research initiatives, and practical strategies geared toward enhancing staff efficiency.

This paper analyzes the relationship between food and oil prices in Nigeria before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, using monthly data from January 2018 to December 2021. The ARDL and NARDL models are applied to estimate the symmetry and asymmetric relationship that exists in food price behavior. The NARDL confirms the presence of asymmetries, and the bound test affirms the co-integration and long-run relationship among the variables. In the long run, there is a significant positive relation between oil price increases and food prices, but the long-run impact of oil price reductions on food prices is not significant. In the short run, only increases in oil prices exert a significant influence on food prices, while decreases in oil prices do not. Furthermore, the COVID-19 period exerts a positive and significant impact on food prices, while COVID-19 cases do not influence food prices in Nigeria.

Recent studies suggest that shadow economy has several implications for environmental sustainability. However, the relevance of financial development in the nexus between shadow economy-environmental sustainability remains an open question. This study examines the role of shadow economy and financial development in addition to economic growth, trade openness, and urbanization on the environmental sustainability of a panel of 30 African countries from 1991 to 2017. Specifically, the study investigates the effect of these variables on African countries’ ecological footprint and bio-capacity. Findings based on the augmented mean group estimator reveal that shadow economy, financial development, economic growth, and urbanization intensify ecological footprint, while trade openness reduces it. Further investigations reveal that shadow economy, economic growth, and urbanization reduce bio-capacity while trade openness increases it. The interactive term of the shadow economy and financial development shows that a strong financial system significantly moderates the adverse impact of shadow economy on environmental degradation. These results persist when common correlated effect mean group is used to re-estimate the models. Furthermore, Dumitrescu and Hurlin’s non-causality tests show two-way causality between ecological footprint and shadow economy, bio-capacity and shadow economy, and financial development. Nevertheless, unidirectional causality is found from financial development to ecological footprint and shadow economy, economic growth to ecological footprint, biocapacity, and financial development. Lastly, the policy implications of the results are discussed in line with these economies.

Motivated by the growing levelof informal economy in emerging economies, this study examines the role of the informal economy in the ecological footprint for the case of Africa. The relationship between official economy, trade openness, governance indicator, financial development, and urbanization on ecological footprint is also investigated. Applying data from 1991 to 2017, this empiric utilizes panel estimation procedures to account for cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity in panel data. The results establish the presence of cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity across countries in Africa. Furthermore, long-run cointegration is confirmed using Westerlund panel cointegration. Driscoll-Kraay’s (DK) estimation technique shows that informal economy, official economy, governance, financial development, and urbanization have significant positive impacts on ecological footprint, implying that they contribute to environmental degradation. However, trade openness has a negative and significant effect on ecological footprint, improving environmental quality. Similarly, the Dumitrescu-Hurlin (DH) Granger causality test reveals a two-way relationship between the informal economy and ecological footprint and formal economy and ecological footprint. However, the study finds a one-way connection from urbanization and financial development to ecological footprint and from ecological footprint to governance indicators and trade openness. The implications of the findings for a sustainable environment are discussed.

Purpose: Motivated by the conflicting evidence on the effect of financial development on environmental quality, this study investigates the moderating role of institutional quality in the link between financial development and environmental quality using a robust proxy in Malaysia from 1984 to 2017.Design/methodology/approach: Ecological footprint is used to measure environmental quality, while financial development is proxied using three measures (domestic credit provided by the private sector, domestic credit provided by the financial sector and domestic credit provided by the banking sector). An index of institutional quality is generated from voice and accountability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption. Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bounds Test, Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square and Canonical Cointegrating Regression were used as the estimation techniques.Findings: The results show that financial development, institutional quality, economic growth and foreign direct investment improve environmental quality in the short run, whereas trade openness and natural resources worsen it. In the long run, financial development, institutional quality, economic growth, trade openness and natural resources deteriorate the environment. Furthermore, findings from the interactive term suggest that institutions and financial development complement each other to affect the environment in the short run. However, institutions and financial development perform a substitutability role in influencing the environment in the long run.Practical implications: The outcome of this study suggests that there are time lags in the relationship between institutional quality, financial development and ecological footprint in Malaysia. Furthermore, the study offers important policy implications to policymakers in Malaysia and other developing countries on how to mitigate environmental degradation.Originality/value: This study contributes to the body of knowledge on the moderating role of institutional quality in the relationship between financial development and ecological footprint in Malaysia. It examines the direct and indirect effects of financial development on environmental degradation through institutional quality, which have received less attention in the context of Malaysia. The findings from this study are robust to different proxies and estimation techniques.