EFFECT OF HOUSEHOLD CHARACTERISTICS ON THE DECISION TO CONSUME STAPLE FOODS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Knowledge about the factors influencing household decision to consume staple foods under recent changing economic conditions is essential in evaluating the impact of Souh African government’s trade and domestic policies and marketing firm’s strategies. This study estimates a multinomialogistic model using 1993 integrated household survey data to examine the effect of household socio-economic and demographic characteristics on the decision to consume staple foods in South Africa. Results of the analysis indicate that socio-economic and demographic characteristics of households are important factos influencing the decision to consume staple foods. Empirical results indicate that, holding all things constant, the change in the probability of consuming staple foods for a unit change in income and price is very low. The results demonstrate that developing marketing strategies and government policies that target specific market segments is an effective means of promoting the use of staple foods. Findings from this study suggest that the household decision to consume staple foods could decline given increased urbanisation and changing tastes and preferences in South Africa

Social and environmental reporting and the co-creation of corporate legitimacy

This paper extends the legitimacy theory by empirically investigating the extent and context of social, environmental and total voluntary non-financial disclosures across industries. The study uses 312 annual reports of publicly listed Indian companies for the accounting years 2006, 2012 and 2014. We follow a Multivariate Ordinary Least Squares (MOLS) modelling framework to test the hypotheses. Our empirical results indicate that the decision to provide voluntary non-financial disclosure is positively related to a firm’s age, profitability, industrial category and leverage. Our results further indicate that, contrary to legitimacy theory, the decision to provide social and environmental non-financial disclosures by sampled publicly listed companies is found to correlate negatively with consumer proximity, leverage and industrial transport industry membership. Our results add new empirical evidence to support the view that non-financial disclosure by companies is influenced by country-specific characteristics within which the firm operates. Future research could extend the study to other emerging countries and include data from unlisted companies to validate our findings. To cite this document: Asit Bhattacharyya and Frank Wogbe Agbola, "Social and Environmental Reporting and the Co-creation of Corporate Legitimacy", Contemporary Management Research, Vol.14, No.3, pp. 191-223, 2018. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.7903/cmr.1824

Dynamic and static behaviour with respect to energy use and investment of Dutch Greenhouse firms

Dutch greenhouse horticulture firms are energy-intensive and major emitters of greenhouse gases. This paper develops a theoretically consistent model that is able to describe the greenhouse firms’ behaviour regarding energy use and investments in energy technology. The behaviour of the firm is modelled using a combination of a dynamic cost function and a static profit function framework. The optimal quantity of energy is derived from the link between these two functions. The model is applied to a panel of 97 Dutch greenhouse firms over the period 2001–2008. The results show that most Dutch greenhouse firms shift from being net electricity users to net electricity producers in the long term. Investing in energy capital contributes to reducing net energy use, however it increases the quantity of carbon dioxide emissions due to an increase in electricity production. A 1 % increase of the price of gas reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 1.6 %

Foreign direct investment and human capital in developing countries: a panel data approach

Theoretical studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between human capital and foreign direct investment (FDI). However, only a few available empirical studies have attempted to investigate this relationship simultaneously. Using country level panel data from 55 developing countries over the 1980–2011 period, this paper examines the interrelationship between FDI and human capital. Statistical analysis, based on simultaneous equations fixed effect estimation, reveals significant bi-directional causality between human capital and FDI, which suggests that FDI and human capital development policies need to be coordinated. FDI-led economic growth models may not be entirely suitable for all developing countries aiming to replicate the economic success of countries such as Brazil and China unless attention is also paid to human capital development through increased spending on education and training