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In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) revised upwards the recommended contacts for antenatal care (ANC) by expectant mothers with a health provider from a minimum of four to eight over the pregnancy period. Although Ghana is yet to adopt the new recommendation, some women choose to adhere to the new protocol because of its enormous health benefits to the expecting mother and the unborn child. As part of ANC, family planning services are also provided to ensure child spacing and birth control. To reduce health costs, government introduced the free maternal health policy, Community-based Health Planning Services, Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty and established the Northern Development Authority to increase access to healthcare and also create wealth. Given these interventions, the study hypothesizes that household wealth would not have a significant influence on antenatal visits and modern contraceptive use. Therefore, this paper aims to examine whether household wealth would play any significant role on the new minimum contacts proxied by antenatal visits and also on the use of modern contraceptives as a family planning counselling tool during ANC visits. The study further examines a possible heterogeneity effect of paternal characteristic on maternal health service utilization.

The study used data from the most recent Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS, 2014). Both bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to investigate the effects of household wealth on the number of antenatal visits and modern contraceptive use. The bivariate analysis employed the use of chi-square test whiles, the multivariate analysis involved estimations using logistic regressions.

The findings show that household wealth would play a critical role given the revised WHO minimum ANC contacts by expectant mothers. Household wealth exerts a positive and significant effect on ANC for all wealth quintiles for women who attended at least eight ANC visits, but was insignificant for the poorer and middle quintiles of those who attended four to seven visits. Wealth, however, had an insignificant relationship with modern contraceptive use. Generally, education, age, birth order, media exposure as well as geographical locations had a significant influence on both ANC visits and modern contraceptive use. The study further revealed a heterogeneous effect on ANC attendance. In particular, despite the relatively poor conditions, women in rural areas whose partners/husbands have attained a minimum of secondary education are about twice more likely to attend 4–7 antenatal visits compared to their counterparts whose husbands/partners are without education. Hence, a holistic health education, which includes husbands/partners in the rural areas as well as strengthening interventions that improve livelihoods, is crucial.

Health guidelines are constantly reviewed, and government policies must adapt accordingly. This paper looks at the significant role household wealth still plays on modern contraceptive use and ANC visits, given the revised WHO minimum ANC contacts and uniquely underscores the influence of paternal characteristics on the utilization of these maternal health services.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of corporate (CG) and Islamic (IG) governance mechanisms on corporate earnings management (EM) behaviour in Oman.

The authors employ one of the largest and extensive data sets to-date on CG, IG and EM in any developing country, consisting of a sample of 116 unique Omani listed corporations from 2001 to 2011 (i.e. 1,152 firm-year observations) and a broad CG index containing 72 CG provisions. The authors also employ a number of robust econometric models that sufficiently account for alternative CG/EM proxies and potential endogeneities.

First, the authors find that, on average, better-governed corporations tend to engage significantly less in EM than their poorly governed counterparts. Second, the evidence suggests that corporations that depict greater commitment towards incorporating Islamic religious beliefs and values into their operations through the establishment of an IG committee tend to engage significantly less in EM than their counterparts without such a committee. Finally and by contrast, the authors do not find any evidence that board size, audit firm size, the presence of a CG committee and board gender diversity have any significant relationship with the extent of EM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is a first empirical attempt at examining the extent to which CG and IG structures may drive EM practices that explicitly seek to draw new insights from a behavioural theoretical framework (i.e. behavioural theory of corporate boards and governance).

Analysts of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa have argued that its “neopatrimonial regimes,” descending from pre-colonial polities, translate badly to the scale of the nation-state and hinder democratic accountability. In this paper, I argue by contrast that the problem with today’s failed or failing states is that they are not patrimonial enough, if we understand patrimonialism in classic Weberian terms as a system based on traditions of reciprocal interdependence between rulers and citizens, and characterized by personal but malleable ruling networks. I make this argument by showing how the Asante Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries shifted from a working model, incorporating both patrimonial and bureaucratic forms of authority, to an exploitative one that reneged on its traditional commitments to the wider public. The cause of this shift was the expansion of exchange with European nations as a rival avenue to power and wealth. This problem continues today, where African rulers are incentivized by the demands of global banks, the United Nations, and G20 governments rather than internal authority traditions, thus limiting their ability to establish locally effective and publically accountable hybrids of patrimonial and bureaucratic governance.