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The chapter examining the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on audit quality to achieve business sustainable practices, trying to found that using of AI as a substitute for human intelligence affects auditor’s capability and experience, from other hand affects audit process, starting from audit planning until issuance of reporting. Based on literature review about AI and audit quality, the chapter findings showed that AI adoption is a necessary requirement for auditors due to time constraints, accuracy requirements, and job speed requirements. The impact of AI on audit quality is profound and multifaceted. By leveraging the capabilities of AI, auditors can enhance the accuracy, efficiency and objectivity of their work.

To guarantee that the application of AI benefits the auditing profession and the public it serves, it is imperative to solve the obstacles that come with it. AI has the ability to greatly improve audit quality, but its deployment needs to be closely monitored to prevent any early problems. With appropriate training, data, and governance, AI can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of audits, leading to more accurate and reliable financial reporting. However, it is important for auditors to be aware of the challenges and risks associated with AI and to take steps to mitigate these risks. Where cybersecurity is a protection line for external threats and it is considered as a new risk management tool.

This study aims to examine Africa’s environment, social and governance (ESG) research through a systematic literature review (SLR). The authors aim to identify and discuss influential aspects of ESG accounting in Africa, focusing on prominent themes, authors and journals in published articles using Africa’s setting. It also constructs agendas for future research to advance the literature and contribute to the ESG accounting practices in Africa.

This study uses an SLR approach, where accounting research journal articles are collated and compiled according to pre-determined criteria and analysed using bibliometric techniques. After carefully reviewing 1,387 articles, the authors selected and examined 246 academic articles published from 2006 to 2024 in 32 accounting journals indexed in the Web of Science.

The authors identify four main streams of ESG accounting research in Africa, namely, ESG disclosure in primary-based economies; corporate governance dynamics in Africa; internal mechanisms in ESG reporting; and external mechanisms in ESG disclosure. According to the analysis, the authors propose future research agendas to discuss institutional perspective of ESG reporting standards implementation and enforcement; value creation impact on sustainability performance; ESG reporting effect on conflict resolution; and ESG reporting quality and environmental sustainability.

This study assists policymakers, academics, managers, accounting professionals and investors in comprehensively understanding the current state and projecting future actions to develop ESG accounting in Africa.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is perhaps the first to examine Africa’s ESG research through an SLR. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a comprehensive analysis of the existing ESG accounting landscape and tailoring future research agendas based on the distinctive characteristics of Africa.

The chapter examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on audit quality to achieve business sustainable practices, trying to find that using AI as a substitute for human intelligence affects auditors’ capability and experience, and it also affects audit process, starting from audit planning to the issuance of reporting to improve business sustainability. Based on the literature review about AI and audit quality, the chapter findings showed that AI adoption is a necessary requirement for auditors due to time constraints, accuracy requirements and job speed requirements. The impact of AI on audit quality is profound and multifaceted. By leveraging the capabilities of AI, auditors can enhance the accuracy, efficiency and objectivity of their work.

To guarantee that the application of AI benefits the auditing profession and the public it serves, it is imperative to solve the obstacles that come with it. AI has the ability to greatly improve audit quality, but its deployment needs to be closely monitored to prevent any early problems. With appropriate training, data and governance, AI can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of audits, leading to more accurate and reliable financial reporting, which directly achieve business sustainability through enhancing financial reporting quality, investors’ confidence, corporate governance and mitigation of agency conflicts.

International trade and its effects on the environment are increasingly discussed both in academia and by policymakers. To counter negative effects of international trade on the environment, so called environmental provisions have been integrated in trade agreements aimed at businesses and economies. However, as both the intent and effectiveness of these provisions are controversial, this paper aims to provide an overview of the current state of research and identified key factors influencing their effectiveness.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of 44 papers on the effects of environmental provisions in international trade agreements on the environmental performance of businesses, as well as economies from 1992 to mid-2024.

The integration of environmental provisions into trade agreements generally has positive effects on the environment while their effectiveness is influenced by their design and several boundary conditions. Alongside the importance of effective enforcement mechanisms, reputation concerns of businesses and lobbyism are discussed as intermediary factors in the design and impact of environmental provisions.

The insights can benefit policymakers to optimize future environmental provisions and advance the effectiveness of policies aimed at balancing the effects of trade liberalization with environmental protection.

Social sustainability is increasingly relevant for creating more sustainable trade policy while societal mechanisms seem to be an adequate tool to ensure effective enforcement of ecological provisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review is the first of its kind to provide a systematic overview of the literature on the effectiveness of environmental provisions that combines the micro-level of businesses and macro-level of economies, although the importance for trade in general and environmental protection, in particular, has been recognized in the academic literature.

Previous studies have considered the presence of women directors on corporate boards and their impact on financial performance in isolation, disregarding their interaction with other corporate boards and firm-level attributes. Consequently, the results of such studies are largely inconclusive. This study addresses this gap by adopting a system’s approach to corporate governance characteristics and firm financial performance, rooted in a configurational approach.

The authors used fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the association of outside executive women directors and family-affiliated executive women directors with financial performance in the presence of board and firm-level characteristics in 216 listed non-financial family firms in Pakistan over the period of 2014–2019.

The findings reveal that various configurations of board and firm characteristics lead to high financial performance, underscoring conjunction, equifinality and asymmetry. The authors note that, the presence of outside executive women directors on corporate boards is frequently associated with high financial performance compared to family-affiliated executive women directors. Additionally, results indicates that presence of either outside executive women directors, family-affiliated executive women directors or both on corporate board associates with low level of leverage and vice versa. Moreover, high proportion of independent directors, large board size and large firm size are frequently associated with high ROE and Tobin’s Q.

This study introduces a novel perspective by integrating board and firm-level characteristics using a configurational approach. Focusing on listed non-financial family firms, the study highlights the asymmetric association between women directors and financial performance, suggesting that their impact fluctuates based on their combination with other board- and firm-level attributes. The study’s findings challenge the notion of a one-size-fits-all approach to board gender diversity and call for a more contextual understanding of how different types of women directors contribute to firm performance in family firms.

Borrowers are usually presented with a menu of similar-looking options when selecting a loan plan. However, it remains unclear whether they are able to choose the most cost-effective plan. This study aims to investigate whether people select loan plans optimally, whether their choices are influenced by the informational cues provided to them and how their selections change with the provision of additional loan-related information.

The study uses a within-participant experimental design, where participants are presented with similar-looking loan plans but with different present discounted costs. Subjects are asked to rank those plans, with the minimum present discounted cost plan maximizing their experimental payoff. The loan plans across different rounds are presented with different informational cues to see whether that influences participants' ability to select the cost-minimizing loan plans.

The author finds that participants were 78% likely to state a suboptimal preference ordering and 68% likely to select a loan plan that does not minimize cost. There is suggestive evidence regarding the role of attribute substitution in the decision-making process, wherein participants substituted annual percentage rate (APR) and total cost attributes for the present discounted cost of a loan plan. Additionally, the author presents causal evidence demonstrating how providing additional information can influence the choice of the substituted attribute.

Research has indicated that individuals often make suboptimal financial decisions, particularly in complex decision contexts. Examples include selecting medical insurance, a retirement savings plan, a student loan or borrowing on a credit card. This paper demonstrates that similar biases are present when individuals borrow using a loan plan, wherein they tend to substitute the APR or total cost of the loan plan for the present discounted cost of the loan plan. Furthermore, the study reveals that the impact of providing more information to borrowers can vary, depending on the combination of loan plans being considered.

The purpose of this study is to construct a robust index and subindices to measure the quality of corporate governance for 266 firms listed in South Africa from 2004 to 2021.

Public information on the compliance of King Code of Good Corporate Governance is used to construct a main index predicated on provisions relating to board characteristics, accounting and auditing and risk management. These categories are transformed into three subindices. All constructs are scored with binary coding and equally weighted.

Cronbach’s alpha test reveals that the index and subindices are highly reliable measures of corporate governance. The principal component analysis supports the construct validity of all measures.

The index is limited to only three corporate governance subcategories and only focuses on South Africa.

These corporate governance indices provide governing authorities, policymakers, investors and other market participants direct information on the quality of corporate governance in South African firms.

As South Africa lacks a formal corporate governance indicator, the development of an appropriate corporate governance index and subindices contributes towards understanding the quality of corporate governance in South African firms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to conduct robustness tests on corporate governance indices designed for South African companies.

Research on the living conditions of slum dwellers in the inner cities of developing countries has received much attention. Nevertheless, there is little empirical research on the influence of personal attributes on the poor environmental condition of the slum area. This study aims to examine the relationship between the socio-economic characteristics and the physical condition of the slum environment in the inner city of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Data was collected through the use of questionnaire administration from a household survey of 491 slum dwellers. Systematic random sampling was used in the selection of the respondents. The study used descriptive, factor and multiple regression to analyse the data collected.

The study used descriptive, factor and multiple regression to analyse the data collected. The study reveals an interplay between various socio-economic factors and environmental conditions. The results show that out of ten (10) socio economic variables that were submitted in the regression model, only eight (8) of these variables such as income, household size, occupation, level of education, age, marital status, year of residency and nativity were significant.

The study concluded that despite the fact that the condition of the slum environment is a product of multiple interrelated factors, personal attributes also contribute to the poor environmental condition of the slum area. The study recommended that improving the socio-economic conditions of slum dwellers would lead to improved environmental conditions.

Intellectual capital is an essential intangible resource for enterprises, and different combinations of intellectual and environmental elements will produce different innovation effects. This study aims to analyze the effects of different matching combinations of intellectual capital elements and environmental uncertainty elements of firms on improving ambidextrous innovation (exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation).

Based on data from 161 listed companies in China, we employ a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify the paths that effectively promote ambidextrous innovation in enterprises.

Through group analysis, we derived five realization paths of exploratory innovation and five of exploitative innovation respectively. We further find that among these innovation realization paths, human capital plays a more prominent role in facilitating exploitative innovation, while relational capital plays a more important role in realizing exploratory innovation.

This research not only significantly contributes to the theory of ambidextrous innovation, but also helps firms identify the multiple paths of realization that trigger high-exploratory and exploitative innovation, avoiding unnecessary waste caused by resource mismatch, and providing valuable insights for firms seeking to adopt an ambidextrous innovation strategy effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the literature related to integrated reporting (IR) to develop insight into how IR research is developing and highlight the gaps in the existing research. This can provide a framework for asking more specific and directed research questions.

The study was based on a systematic literature review (SLR) of 102 articles published in eight journals between 2013 and 2022.

The academic literature has not yet covered all topics and fields of the IR. It highlights numerous areas where further robust academic research is required to guide developments in policy and practice. Scholars prefer the qualitative research approach. The majority of papers are concerned with IIRC framework and theories of legitimacy, institutional, agency, stakeholders and diffusion of innovations theory. Most studies use the context of South Africa, Australia and some European nations, and there has been a lack of comprehensive country studies.

A key limitation is that it is based on eight communication channels, but it provides opportunities for considerable further developments. Although the SLR itself ensures the objectivity of the present study, limitations can be found in the selection of papers and journals, as well as its limited focus on English-language literature. Current study has divided the IR research into six focus areas. Future study should also divide IR into additional categories, such as big data and IR, materiality disclosure in IR quality studies and assurance services and IR.

This paper outlined a future research agenda for how <IR> research could be improved. This research agenda can help researchers and academics to discover under-investigated topics and focus on developments of IR in different economies. It also might help regulators to develop some policies, models, strategies and frameworks for its future implementation. For managers, adopting and implementing IR in a company is likely to improve management quality by bringing an integrated perspective that is not solely focused on financial objectives. However, it also focuses on sustainability issues by integrating sustainability into the organization’s strategy and business model.

This research provides a better understanding of integrated report topics. This opens the debate for future research. By increasing IR practices, the transparency and accountability enjoyed by companies will increase, in addition to improving the organization’s image in society by providing stakeholders needs, focusing on sustainability issues, reducing the negative impacts of corporate activities on the environment and improving the life quality and well-being of society.

The paper provides the growing number of academic researchers related to IR with a foundation and agenda upon which they can build their research.