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The purpose of this paper is to critically assess the newly created regulatory and policing regime for age-restricting access to pornography in the UK.

It examines the pivotal legislation, policy and strategy documents, consultation submissions and interventions from a range of stakeholders such as children’s charities, content providers and privacy advocates.

Even before its implementation, the regulatory regime betrays serious flaws and shortcomings in its framing and configuration. These difficulties include its inability to significantly curtail minors’ access to online pornography and risks of privacy violations and associated harms to legitimate users’ interests.

Remedial measures are available so as to address some of the problems identified. However, it is argued that ultimately the attempt to prohibit minors from accessing such content is set to fail, and that alternative approaches – such as better equipping children through education to cope with explicit materials online – need to be given greater prominence.

This paper provides the first criminological policy analysis of this latest attempt to regulate and police online behaviour, and offers an important critical response to such efforts.

This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how traceurs move around and navigate the city. It draws upon a blend of non-representational theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the attraction to parkour’s intensely embodied, effective and risk-taking practice. It then looks at how the traceurs exist in the interstices of hyper-regulated urban spaces and develop an alternative cartography of the city, which is generated from their situated knowledge and the temporal rhythms and flows in the city centre’s consumer economy. It is argued that this alternative cartography constitutes a spatio-bodily transgression that violates the hyper-regulated city’s command for its subjects to be passive bodies who accept the dominant cartography of the city geared towards consumption.

This study examines the impact of ownership structure on firm financial performance, for 146 manufacturing firms listed at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) for the period 2003–2012.

The theoretical background of the present study is based on the agency theory. Ownership structure is measured by institutional shareholdings, insider shareholdings, foreign shareholders and government shareholdings, while return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), market-to-book ratio (MBR) and Tobin's Q (TQ) are used as proxies of corporate financial performance. The dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) method is employed to cater for the issue of endogeneity.

We find that institutional ownership exerts a significant positive impact on ROE and MBR, which suggests that institutional investors play a significant role in improving the financial performance of the sample Pakistani. Furthermore, the results reveal a significant positive relationship of insider ownership with ROA, ROE, MBR and TQ, which is consistent with the prediction of agency theory that concentration of insider ownership aligns the interest of shareholders with those of the managers and hence improves performance. A significant positive association of government shareholdings with ROA and ROE was also found. Therefore, policymakers may encourage government ownership in firms, which can help to improve corporate financial performance.

The present study contributes to the existing literature on ownership structure and corporate financial performance in an emerging market like Pakistan. It is worth mentioning that the institutional setup and corporate governance structure in Pakistan is yet at an evolving stage. Findings of this study may provide useful insights to corporate managers and investors about the relationship between ownership structure and financial performance of firms from the manufacturing sector in Pakistan.

By testing the weak form of efficient market hypothesis (EMH) this study aims to forecast the short-term stock prices of the US Dow and Jones environmental socially responsible index (SRI) and Shariah compliance index (SCI).

This study checks the validity of the weak form of EMH for both SCI and SRI prices by using different parametric and non-parametric tests, i.e. augmented Dickey-Fuller test, Philip-Perron test, runs test and variance ratio test. If the EMH is invalid, the research further forecasts short-term stock prices by applying autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model using daily price data from 2010 to 2018.

The research confirms that a weak form of EMH is not valid in the US SRI and SCI. The historical data can predict short-term future price movements by using technical ARIMA model.

This study provides better guidance to risk-averse national and international investors to earn higher returns in the US SRI and SCI. This study can be extended to test the EMH of Islamic equity in the Middle East and North Africa region and other top Islamic indexes in the world.

This study is a new addition to the existing literature of equity investment and price forecasting by comparing and investigating the market efficiency of two interrelated US SRI and SCI.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which an afforestation programme as spelt out in the Forestry II programme has checked the encroachment of desert in the arid and semi‐arid zone of northern Nigeria.

The study is carried out in the afforestation project states aimed at evaluating the success/failure of the program. Field observation and a site visit are conducted on some communities as well as policies relevant to forestry sector are reviewed.

The preliminary findings of this paper indicate that the afforestation projects had a positive impact on both biophysical and socioeconomic environment and contributed to the sustainability of the afforestation programme.

This paper is primarily focused on the various components of the Forestry II programme and the extent they have helped in combating desertification.

The paper addresses the need for sustainable afforestation projects and discusses on how the community effort and participation of women plays an important role during the afforestation programs.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained tremendous importance after several corporate scandals, financial crises and the rise of the hyper-competitive world. Firms must address multiple stakeholders’ interests to increase firm value. This study aims to investigate the effect of CSR on firm value. This study also examines the mediating role of enterprise risk management (ERM) and the moderating influence of corporate governance (CG) in this CSR-firm value relationship.

The sample of the study comprises 119 Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) listed firms and the study covers the period from 2010 to 2021. The corporate social responsibility performance has been quantified across five dimensions. These aspects are product, environment, employee relations, diversity and community. Four proxies i.e. strategy, operation, reporting and compliance, have been used to measure ERM. The governance quality of the sample companies was evaluated using the governance index, which included 29 governance provisions. The authors used the dynamic panel data technique (system-GMM) is used to achieve the objectives of the study. Furthermore, a firm’s engagement in CSR activities can also be measured through a multinational financial approach to check the robustness of the result.

Based on the regression analysis, the authors discovered that CSR was positively connected with firm value, validating the stakeholder view of CSR. Furthermore, following Baron and Kenny’s (1986) mediation technique, the findings confirm that ERM mediates this association. These results are robust by using the bootstrapping tests by Preacher and Hayes (2004). Furthermore, the result shows that corporate governance (CG) is positively connected with firm performance, and this relationship is strengthened in the presence of an effective governance system in the organization.

This study provides useful insights to regulators, investors and policymakers to consider CSR as a value-enhancing factor and encourage the development of enterprise risk management and compliance with CG mechanisms to improve firm value.

The presented analysis strengthens the existing CSR–firm value relationship by analyzing the mediating and moderating roles of ERM and CG, which have not yet been tested, particularly in the context of Pakistan.