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The African farming sector suffers from insufficient finance. Climate changes and socio-political issues hold down the required production level while food on the continent is still inadequate, with more vulnerable people on the one side. On the other side, credit institutions need reasons and guarantees to raise their risk-taking level (financial benefits). Then, this study tries to conciliate those two sides with new shreds of evidence by demonstrating the short and long-run effects of agricultural production on bank sustainability in 40 Sub-Saharan African countries. The study used different agro-production factors (Food and Cereal production factors), bank stability proxies (Liquidity Ratio, NPLs, LLRs), and bank profitability proxies (ROA and ROE). The GMM, DFE, and FMOLS models were used for short (with the 2010-2019 dataset) and long-run analysis (with the 1970-2018 dataset). The results demonstrated that agricultural production increases bank stability and profitability but reduces bank risks. The study concludes that farming finance increases agro-production and stabilizes banks (win-win). Governments, via central banks, should encourage commercial banks to increase bank risk-taking levels to sustain their banking system, increase farming production, and improve food security.

Research has indicated that problems related to behavioral support for organizational change must be re-addressed to provide an improved implementation of changes. It is essential to explore factors for the complex implications of organizational change before implementing it in practice. This research aims to explore predictors of behavioral support for organizational change in Ethiopian commercial banks. In-depth interviews with purposive and convenient sampling techniques were conducted with employees (n=43) because qualitative research provides opportunities to explore employee experiences and get detailed information about how they perceive behavioral support for organizational change. This study used grounded theory and thematic analysis to explain behavioral support for organizational change and to establish a theoretical basis for further investigations. Our findings indicate that traditional predictors for behavioral support for organizational change might not be enough. This study suggested three new predictors: "perceived cost," "reward," and "prior change experience" to explore behavioral support for organizational change. The study tried to clarify organizational change drivers from employees' perspectives, which offered an alternative avenue that could provide the foundation for accepting organizational change.

Behavior change maintenance can guide the development and evaluation of interventions promoting sustained behaviors in organizational changes. This research aims to examine the factors that influence behavioral maintenance for organizational change in Ethiopian commercial banks. The study developed a comprehensive model to explain the mechanism of behavioral maintenance for organizational change by employees, using self-determination theory with two additional exogenous constructs, value congruence and excessive work demands. Applying mixed-analytical approaches, including SEM and fsQCA, advances the knowledge of how employees motivate to maintain their behavior regarding the organizational change. The target population consists of lower-level managers and 317 valid responses were retained for further analysis. In our findings, the SEM results reveal that perceived relatedness, perceived competency, perceived autonomy, and perceived enjoyment influence employees' behavioral maintenance for organizational change, the fsQCA results indicated that value congruence must always be combined in these variables. The findings suggested an alternative path that might serve as the basis for sustaining organizational change.

Behavior maintenance for organizational change is the continuous behavior performance following an initial intentional change. This research examines the importance of factors that influence behavioral maintenance for organizational change. This study proposes a research model incorporating self-determination, regular-fit, self-concept, and habit theories to identify potential influencing factors of behavioral maintenance for organizational change in Ethiopia and quantify the importance level of these factors using ML techniques. A survey study was carried out in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with 310 valid responses. The comparison of five different ML techniques shows that Naive Bayes (GaussianNB) outperforms the other classification model.  Naive Bayes (GaussianNB) model-based feature importance analysis shows that perceived competency, perceived enjoyment, and perceived autonomy are the most prominent contributor to behavioral maintenance for organizational change. The results confirmed that the quality of individuals' motivation affects the extent to which individuals will engage in, and persist with, behaviors.

This study investigates the relationship between teaching style and learning effectiveness and further examines the mediating effect of learning motivation in the relationship between teaching style and learning effectiveness. This study adopted the undergraduate students of University A in China as the research sample and conducted a quantitative survey to test the hypothetical relationship between these variables. The results showed that (i) the teacher-centered teaching style significantly negatively affected professional knowledge. (ii) the student-centered and the eclectic-centered teaching styles significantly positively affected professional knowledge and comprehensive ability, respectively. In addition, the hierarchical regression technique was used to examine the mediating effect of learning motivation. The findings revealed that (iii) intrinsic learning motivation had a partial mediating effect on the relationship between teaching style (student-centered and eclectic-centered teaching style) and learning effectiveness (professional knowledge and comprehensive ability). (iv) extrinsic motivation partially mediates the relationship between student-centered teaching style and learning effectiveness (professional knowledge and comprehensive ability).

This paper explores the relationship between content marketing and consumer brand loyalty to the ‘New-China-Chic’ brand. It constructs a structural equation model, Through questionnaires distributed to the fan groups of various brands and offline stores, results show that the four different dimensions of content marketing strategy, namely the culture, entertainment, emotion and interaction, are the main factors affecting consumers' loyalty to the ‘New-China-Chic’ brand. Among them, emotional content and cultural content??= 0.304??= 0.209) have a strong impact on brand loyalty. Brand identity also plays a strong intermediary role in the relationship between the four different dimensions of content marketing and brand loyalty. Moreover, the data shows that consumer ethnocentrism has a significant regulatory effect on brand identity and brand loyalty in cultural content and emotional content, while interactive content and entertainment content have a weak impact.

This study explains the modes of intergenerational succession by female successors in Chinese family businesses and the selection mechanism. In view of the family businesses to which females (daughters) belong, this paper proposes five types of intergenerational succession modes of family businesses, namely the kindred-based succession by the daughter, kindred-based succession by others, joint succession by the daughter and her siblings, joint succession by the daughter and her husband (son-in-law), and succession by a professional manager. By means of case analysis, this study also explores the driving forces for choosing a proper model from the above five succession modes, including family structure, the father’s and business owner’s attitudes, and the daughter’s attitude toward succession, etc. This paper contributes to the domain of the intergenerational succession mode by ‘female (daughter) successors’ in Chinese family-owned businesses theoretically and practically.

The main purpose of this study is to identify the impact of intellectual capital efficiency (ICE) also known as knowledge capital along with its components human capital efficiency (HCE) and structural capital efficiency (SCE) on bank risk-taking behavior in Bangladesh. To reveal this effect, the study uses generalized method of moment (GMM) estimator and Two Stages Least Square estimator (to check the Robustness) and unbalanced panel data of 32 commercial banks of Bangladesh consisting of 530 bank-year observations during the year 2003-2020. The main results of the study are: (a) ICE is significantly and positively connected with a bank’s credit risk which indicates credit risk grows up with the increase of Intellectual capital efficiency, and (b) Both the human capital efficiency and structural capital efficiency positively impacts credit risk but the impact of SCE is not significant as HCE, (c) Bank performance (ROA), RWATA, macro variable inflation, and size have a negative impact on bank risk whereas ID and GGDP insignificant positively impact on bank’s risk. Finally, the results of the study will assist the stakeholders, policymakers, and academicians for future research.

Natural Rubber (NR) is an important agricultural product utilized in various sectors. NR is one of the world's biggest industries and a critical component in many industries such as automotive, manufacturing, and medicine. Liberia is a top producer of NR with over 127 years of production history. However, since 2014, Liberia's NR net production has decreased by 0.7% year on year and has fallen behind Sri Lanka. NR production in Liberia has experienced scant performance due to many factors. In this project, we employ mixed-method research to examine the factors influencing the decline of the Liberian NR supply chain and propose solutions that will further stimulate the industry's growth. We conduct an MCDM study among 34 smallholder rubber farmers from Grand Bassa, Margibi and Bong counties. Their grading of ten policy objectives and recommendations are programmed using Fuzzy AHP.

China as a hot luxury market has witnessed high growth in luxury sales despite the COVID-19. In recent years, many luxury companies have further improved their brand value and influence via co-branding strategies, however, their brand cooperation received mixed evaluations. Drawing on the conceptual blending theory and self-concept consistency theory, this paper constructs and verifies the structural equation model of consumer evaluation of luxury co-branding from the perspectives of the brands and the consumers. The study reveals that luxury co-branding fit, advertising types and the consumers’ life-role transition have a positive impact on consumer evaluation. Both the type of advertising and consumers’ life-role transition have a moderating effect on consumer evaluation. Specifically, (i) In luxury co-branding, the co-branded products paired with a high fit between the values of the cooperative brands are more likely to receive high consumer evaluation; (ii) The publicity of the brand image of the co-branded products has a stronger moderating effect on the perceived quality, appeal and purchase intention of luxury users than the publicity of the features of the co-branded products; (iii) For luxury brands with a high degree of joint fit, consumers who have not experienced life-role transformation have a stronger regulatory effect on consumers' perceived quality, attractiveness and purchase intention than consumers who have experienced life-role transformation.

This study aims to investigate users’ satisfaction with e-Government services of Myanmar through a study of a specific e-Government service, the Myanmar Companies Online registration (MyCO) system. The MyCO system was chosen for this study because it is the initiative well-developed e-Government service in Myanmar. On the other hand, the company registration authority of Myanmar, the Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA), has continuously made every endeavor to optimize responsive its e-Government services, after almost four years from the launching date of the MyCO system, systematically analyzing for optimizing the system still remains to research. In order to track public perception of the system, an online survey was conducted. The questionnaires were designed based on the Technology Acceptance Model in the fields of customer satisfaction consisting mainly of three main factors, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and perceived risk. Questionnaires were collected and analyzed with the respondents identifying themselves as having used the MyCO system. Notwithstanding the overall 79% of respondents were very satisfied and 20% were satisfied to some extent, payment transaction issues and some technical challenges are still remained in the system to be addressed to become a better user-centric public service. This study will support a number of contributions to find out the gap between e-Government services implementation and how publics’ expectations of e-Government services. The result of this study will provide awareness to DICA to improve more efficiency and effectiveness in implementing best practices in the provision of user-centric public services based on the public’s needs and demands.

Financial product awareness is an efficient remedy for poverty reduction as against lack of money. However, a holistic literature on financial product awareness in the six Geo-Political Zone of Nigeria is scarce. Using data from a quarterly survey of households in Nigeria, this paper investigated the influence of financial literacy, Socioeconomic and demographic factors on saving behaviors of Nigerians, age 15 to 70. With a pool of methods, our finding supported the observation from similar economies, but revealed some differences as well. We observed that financial literacy and proximity to financial products and services among others are the most significant determinants of savings behaviors of Nigerians. It is fair to say financial awareness and factors that influences it are necessary for the formulation of strategies to increase the inclusion of more members of the society into the formal financial stream.

To improve audit reports' transparency and information content, China implemented new auditing standards in 2017.  The standards, which include disclosing key audit matters, were applied to A+H share companies in 2017 and A-share companies in 2018.  This paper uses A+H-share companies as the experimental group and A-share companies as the control group and applies the difference-in-differences method to test the market response to the new auditing standards.  We find a statistically significant positive cumulative abnormal return (CAR) during the report release event window for the A+H share companies.  The results indicate a greater investor reaction to the release of audit reports under the new standards implying that the audit reforms enhanced the information of the reports.  Furthermore, the positive CAR indicates that the reports reassured investors that the audit did not reveal significant problems or that existing weaknesses were addressed.  We also found a statistically insignificant difference in the volatility of stock prices during the event window for the experimental and control group. 

Ready-made garments (RMG) are one of the most critical sectors in the economy of the South Asian region in terms of the labor force employed and export earnings. This research study aims to determine the Corporate Social Responsibility Stakeholders dimension and its influence on textile firms Performance. The study used organizational legitimacy as mediating variable between the CSR stakeholders and firms’ performances. The research study was used in the quantitative analysis approach to determine the cause and effect of the relationship between CSR and Textile firm’s financial and non-financial performance. Though the study collected primary data & secondary data from 250 respondents using survey questionnaires, the researcher obtained secondary data by analyzing the audited annual and sustainability reports of various RMG companies. We have collected data by conducting a focus group interview forming a team of employers, top-level managers, and CSR officers. We asked them all the questions, filled it, tapped it, reserved it for the interpretations. We have surveyed 67 industries, but it enabled us to collect the data from the 50 sectors—the data collected from 2016 April to 2018 December. Our study has some limitations in that the sample size is small compared to the other research. SPSS-23 & MS-Excel were used to analyze the collected data. CSR practices benefitted RMG companies in terms of long-term sustainable development by increasing the firm’s financial and non-financial performance of the RMG sector.