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In the literature on peace and security, we identify at least two different uses of the term Eurasia. One stakes a rather narrow geographic boundary while the second includes a much broader region. If we adopt the narrower view, Eurasia incorporates the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union and possibly their security zones in Eastern Europe. Choosing to see Eurasia more broadly means defining it as the huge land-mass that comprises the continents of Europe and Asia. We may call the narrower definition Eurasia Minor and the broader one Eurasia Major.

I am interested in exploring how peoples can learn to live together, and how they can learn to give each other the opportunity to flourish without disadvantaging someone else. What non-lethal limitations can be framed around those who refuse to do so, or who insist on carrying the torch of their civilization to attack other people? I am not just asking if the attacks can be stopped. I am looking for more than that, for the capacity for living together. Can local, regional and global structures be harmonized to achieve this?

The Bandung Conference played a constructive role in mobilizing a movement against the bipolar hegemony of the post World War II period. This period, from Yalta (1945) to Malta (1989), can be characterized as an international neo-colonial regime in a post-colonial world. Despite political, economical and cultural differences, the Third World states represented at Bandung called for a counter hegemonic alliance based on the principles of peaceful coexistence (The Pancha Sila).¹ These principles enabled cooperation among the states and peoples of Asia and Africa. The Latin American states later joined this non-aligned movement. The principles of peaceful coexistence, which were first proclaimed by India and China, represented an imaginative reformulation of the modern Western framework of international systems established initially by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This new framework, which based cooperation among the recently independent states on the Western principles of national sovereignty, stressed mutual respect and benefit in place of the Westphalia premise of international anarchy.

Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

This chapter investigates whether earnings management activities increase the likelihood of receiving a qualified audit report. We have carried out this study with a sample of Spanish companies for the period 2001–2009. Previous research on the issue is not only scarce but also suffers from methodological pitfalls. In all cases, researchers have followed a matched sample approach without considering the implications of such approach for the statistical analysis. Despite its great popularity among researchers in accounting, the use of matched-based sampling is susceptible to produce technical errors in the statistical analysis. The main problem consists in the generalization of results obtained with a nonrandom sample to the whole population of firms. Our results do not show a significant relationship between EM and qualified audit reports. We have also addressed whether the international financial crisis has affected our results and concluded that Spanish companies seem to have used EM during the crisis to push down earnings, probably expecting to take advantage of the positive earnings surprises during the postcrisis period. Nevertheless, the financial crisis has not changed the nature of the EM-qualified opinions relationship.

This study provides evidence that financial performance becomes a foundation of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities, and it will be appreciated positively by the market through the firm value. This examination is triggered by different views of ESG activities, such as philanthropy, doing business ethically, the indirect benefit for shareholders, or maintaining reputation. Therefore, it causes differences in ESG activity appreciation by market. Meanwhile, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity is voluntary in Indonesia, so this activity aims to maintain reputation or avoid risk allegations according to environmental and social abuse. This study predicts that a stable firm’s financial performance concerns environmental and social issues. This study uses 139 companies from Indonesian Stock Market Data from 2013 to 2019, which fulfill the criteria of Thompson Reuters for ESG score. The empirical evidence shows that firm financial performance influences ESG score consistently as the antecedent. Further, ESG performance mediates the effect of firm financial performance on firm value. This research contributes to stakeholder theory, CSR practice, and good governance.

This is the first study to investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on corporate financial performance (CFP) in Mongolian banks. We hand-collect data to construct CSR disclosure index from 65 annual reports of 12 banks in Mongolia from 2003 to 2012. The results indicate that banks with larger size or Chief Executive Officer duality exhibit higher CSR performance. Moreover, banks with higher CSR performance tend to have higher net interest margin and lower non-performing loan. Furthermore, the CSR–CFP relationship varies before and after the financial crisis. The findings provide meaningful insight to the foreign investors regarding the effect of CSR on the profitability and credit risk in Mongolian banking sector.

The examination of the differential effects of bailout legislation on well‐capitalized versus under‐capitalized thrifts is the focus of this study. The study examines return responses for portfolios of thrift stocks, formed on the basis of capitalization, to news events concerning bailout funding leading up to and concluding with the President's signing of the Competitive Equality Banking Act of 1987 (CEBA). The results indicate thrifts react differently to legislative news events based on their capitalization levels. This is evidenced by 1) the presence of abnormal returns for portfolios of relatively well‐capitalized and relatively under‐capitalized thrifts, 2) the trends in the size of abnormal returns across well‐capitalized (under‐capitalized) portfolios as the average level of capitalization decreases (increases), and 3) the opposite signs of abnormal returns for relatively well‐capitalized versus relatively under‐capitalized portfolios.

It is worth mentioning that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become a popular vehicle for emerging‐markets firms to rapidly access new opportunities and market capabilities. Indeed, privatization and multi‐nationalization have given a greater shore up in raising global and domestic merger deals. Motivated by these factors, the purpose of this paper is to investigate “do mergers produce abnormal returns around the announcement; conversely, do they improve financial performance in the long‐run?”

The study applies earnings management approach (event study) to compute average abnormal returns (AAR) around the merger announcement for select Indian M&A cases. Further, accounting ratios are considered to assess the long‐run financial performance. Thereafter, t‐stat is applied for testing the proposed hypotheses. In particular, it has performed a later test to the means of financial ratios and variables for both services and manufacturing sectors in accounting ratios and cylinder models, respectively.

The select Indian M&A cases show superior performance during the post‐merger period for both manufacturing and services sectors, and observe a balance sheet improvement in the long‐run.

Sample is one of the limitations to the study. Due to small sample of merger cases, this paper has limited scope to generalize the results. Hence, academic researchers may employ the suggested assessment (cylinder)‐models on a large sample.

The research work would help financial analysts, stockbrokers, M&A advisory and regulatory bodies while designing takeover and open offer policies.

This is an original contribution, which has developed new assessment (cylinder)‐models to examine the post‐merger long‐run financial performance of acquiring firms, especially sector‐wise evaluation.