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The belt and road initiative (BRI) emanates from China and seeks to connect Europe, Asia and Africa through transport and telecommunications infrastructure. Despite the importance of Africa in the BRI network, very little research has been done on the BRI in Africa, and even less of this emanates from Africa itself. In particular, considering that the BRI investments in Africa are largely transport related, there is almost no research covering the area of logistics, which should be greatly affected by the infrastructure investments. This paper sought to establish the current state of logistics research related to the BRI in Africa.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted on documents extracted from the SCOPUS database.

The findings indicate that there is a lack of research in critical areas such as environmental, social and economic impact of BRI transport investments, governance, logistics performance and international cooperation. In particular, there is a massive gap in local knowledge regarding the BRI.

The study is limited to published research indexed in the SCOPUS database. Future research directions include empirical studies into BRI project initiation investigation, economic and environmental impacts, governance structures and policy intervention requirements and macro-level logistics impacts.

The study emphasises the importance publishing all the relevant information regarding BRI related projects in Africa to create transparency.

The study investigates the current research on the effect of China's BRI on transport and logistics in Africa through a bibliometric analysis. The investigation reveals that while there are huge investments in infrastructure, the actual effect on logistics of participating countries in Africa has not been interrogated.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether managers of bankrupt firms are more or less conditionally conservative in their financial reporting relative to non-bankrupt firms. The study further examines the cross-sectional differences in conditional conservatism among bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms.

The study employs a sample of US firms to investigate conditional conservatism in firms that experience financial distress and go bankrupt relative to non-stressed non-bankrupt firms. The study also uses switching regression models to identify the drivers of the cross-sectional difference in conditional conservatism among bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms.

Empirical results show that bankrupt firms are timelier in recognizing bad news than good news when compared to non-bankrupt firms. The higher level of conditional conservatism in bankrupt firms is mainly driven by their higher levels of leverage and tax-reduction incentives. The cross-sectional analyses show that these results largely hold for more leveraged firms and firms with higher tax costs. Taken together, these results suggest that the conservative tendency of managers of bankrupt firms can stem from the agency problem between lenders and managers and from tax-decreasing motivations.

The novelty of the authors’ research stands in studying the drivers of the cross-sectional differences in conditional conservatism between bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms and specifically, the demonstration that taxation also induces conditional conservatism in the setting of ex post bankrupt firms.