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Saudi Arabia is the main destination of religious tourism, as it has many spiritual places. With the passage of years, the figures for pilgrim visits are increasing, which is contributing to the economic growth of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). However, pilgrims’ visits can create strong opportunity costs in the form of environmental degradation. Owing to these notions, this study aims to discover the impact of religious tourism on the quality of the natural environment of Saudi Arabia.

This study develops the empirical relationship between the variables by sampling the data from 35 years ranging from 1986 to 2020. The regression among variables was checked by using fully modified ordinary least square and dynamic ordinary least square models.

This analysis proves that religious tourism has a direct impact on the environmental degradation of KSA. The unceasing visits of pilgrims accelerate various economic operations and activities, e.g. assimilation and digestion of industrial products, that necessarily hamper the environmental quality. In addition, this analysis indicates a negative impact on financial development, foreign investment and renewable energy consumption while the positive impact of fossil fuels assimilation and economic expansion on the secretion of CO₂. The statistical findings are robust and verify the pollution halo hypothesis while rejecting the Environmental Kuznets Curve model in this region.

This analysis recommends restructuring the policies on hajj and Umrah visits. KSA Government should ensure green consumption by pilgrims. The limitation on pilgrims’ visits and the introduction of quotas are alternative policies to impede the pollution in this region.

By controlling the routine determinants, this study offers innovative thoughts regarding the consequences of religious tourism on environmental quality.

通过抽样1986-2020年35年的数据来建立变量之间的实证关系。采用完全修正的普通最小二乘(FMOLS)和动态普通最小二乘(DOLS)模型检验变量间的回归关系

由于沙特阿拉伯有很多精神场所, 是宗教旅游的主要目的地。随着时间的推移, 朝圣访问数据不断增加, 这为沙特阿拉伯王国(KSA)的经济增长做出了贡献。然而, 朝圣访问也可能造成巨大的机会成本, 如环境退化。由于这些观念, 本研究试图揭露宗教旅游对沙特阿拉伯自然环境质量的影响。

研究表明, 宗教旅游对沙特阿拉伯的环境退化有直接影响。持续增长的朝圣来访加速了各种经济运作和活动, 如工业产品的吸收和分解等, 这必然会影响环境质量。此外, 分析表明, 金融发展、外国投资和可再生能源消费受到负面影响, 而化石燃料吸收和经济扩张对二氧化碳的排放产生积极影响。统计结果具有较强的可靠性, 验证了污染晕假说, 同时否定了该地区的环境库兹涅茨曲线(EKC)模型。

本研究建议重构大朝和小朝的政策。沙特阿拉伯政府应该确保朝圣者的绿色消费。朝圣访问的限制和引进配额是防止该地区污染的替代政策。

通过控制常规决定因素, 本研究为宗教旅游对环境质量的影响提供了创新思路。

Se desarrolla la relación empírica entre las variables mediante el muestreo de los datos de 35 años que van de 1986 a 2020. La regresión entre las variables se comprobó empleando modelos de mínimos cuadrados ordinarios totalmente modificados (FMOLS) y mínimos cuadrados ordinarios dinámicos (DOLS)

Arabia Saudí es el principal destino de turismo religioso porque cuenta con numerosos lugares espirituales. Con el paso de los años, las cifras de visitas de peregrinos están aumentando, lo que contribuye al crecimiento económico del Reino de Arabia Saudí (KSA). Sin embargo, las visitas de los peregrinos pueden crear fuertes costes de oportunidad en forma de degradación medioambiental. A partir de estos indicadores, este análisis busca descubrir el impacto del turismo religioso en la calidad del entorno natural de Arabia Saudí.

El análisis demuestra que el turismo religioso tiene un impacto directo en la degradación medioambiental de KSA. Las incesantes visitas de los peregrinos aceleran diversas operaciones y actividades económicas, como la adquisición y consumo de productos industriales, etc., que necesariamente dificultan la calidad medioambiental. Además, el análisis indica un impacto negativo en el desarrollo financiero, la inversión extranjera y el consumo de energías renovables, así como el impacto de la asimilación de combustibles fósiles y la expansión económica en la emisión de CO2. Los resultados estadísticos son robustos y verifican la hipótesis del efecto halo de la contaminación, al tiempo que rechazan el modelo de la curva de Kuznets ambiental (EKC) en esta región.

El análisis recomienda reestructurar las políticas sobre las visitas al hajj y la Umrah. El gobierno de KSA debería garantizar el consumo ecológico de los peregrinos. La limitación de las visitas de los peregrinos y la introducción de cuotas son políticas alternativas para impedir la contaminación en esta región.

Al controlar los determinantes frecuentes, este estudio ofrece reflexiones innovadoras sobre las consecuencias del turismo religioso en la calidad del medio ambiente.

Though agriculture has the potential for job creation for the growing population; nevertheless, most Nigerian youth merely see the agricultural sector as a viable opportunity for livelihood. In the quest for food security, as encapsulated in sustainable development goals (SDGs), youth participation in agriculture is essential to unlock the agricultural sector’s potential and ensure adequate food production.

This study examined the factors influencing youth involvement in agriculture and its impact on food security in Nigeria, using Ekiti and Kwara States. The study engaged a multi-stage random sampling approach. The first stage involved a purposeful selection of the states among youth in agriculture-related activities. The second stage involved randomly selecting five Local Government Areas (LGAs) from each state. The third stage involved a random selection of five communities in the selected LGAs, making it a total of 25 communities for each state. Finally, 20 households were selected per community. In total, 500 respondents were selected from each of the two states, making it a total of 1,000 respondents for the survey. The Foster-Greer-Thorbeck (FGT) analysis uses the logit regression and the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) techniques.

The results showed that a large proportion (about 95%) of the youth farmers in the study area fell below the food security line (N6448.45) and are food insecure. Findings from the PSM showed that youth in agriculture has no significant impact on food security. The findings from the logit regression showed that gender, age, level of education, land ownership, income, safety net or social protection and value chain are significant determinants of youth participation in agriculture.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the determinants of youth in agriculture and its impact on food security in Nigeria, using Ekiti and Kwara States, by engaging the FGT, logit regression and PSM.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the determinants of youth in agriculture and its impact on food security in Nigeria, using Ekiti and Kwara States, by engaging the FGT, logit regression and PSM.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2021-0197

This paper aims to investigate the role of corporate governance on the bank profitability of Indian banks vis-à-vis South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations.

For the Corporate Governance Index, the authors examined board accountability, transparency and disclosure and audit committee, while Tobin’s Q, return on equity and return on assets are used to measure the bank’s profitability. The study used a two-stage analysis based on balanced panel data for robust findings. Sample of this study consists of 60 commercial banks from India and 60 banks from SAARC nations for the period of 2009–2021. This study used panel regression and a generalized method of moment approach using the CAMELS framework on banking industry-specific variables to determine their respective impacts.

The findings of this study suggest that board accountability is positive and significantly affects the profitability of banks as indicated by return on assets, return on equity and Tobin’s Q. In contrast, the audit committee has a positive and insignificant impact on return on assets, return on equity and Tobin’s Q, while transparency and disclosure have a negative and significant impact on these metrics. Furthermore, the country dummy result shows a significant positive impact on all the bank performance parameters, implying that Indian banks have the highest degree of convergence with corporate governance as compared to other SAARC nations.

This study provides insight to the regulators, policymakers and financial institutions to evaluate the role of corporate governance in emerging economies. However, the findings of the study should be interpreted with caution, as the results are sensitive to the disparity between India and other SAARC nations' government policies, climatic circumstances and cultural or religious traditions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to gauge the performance of Indian banks vis-à-vis SAARC nations using the CAMELS framework approach. Further, findings of this study suggest some novel evidence tying corporate governance quality with the profitability of banks among SAARC nations.

This study aims to examine the association between related-party transactions (RPT) and tax avoidance. The study further investigates whether government ownership improves scrutiny of tax aggressiveness activities among Taiwanese group companies.

The authors used 16,061 firm-year observations derived from the Taiwan Economic Journal Database (TEJ) from 2005 to 2021. The authors applied GLS fixed-effect regression. Additional tests, such as a difference-in-difference examination, propensity score matching (PSM) analysis and other tests were performed to obtain more robust results.

The results show different consequences between eliminated and non-eliminated RPT toward tax avoidance. RPT enhances tax benefits aligned with the efficient contracting hypothesis. Under varying degrees of government control, this paper empirically reveals that government ownership has a role in mitigating tax avoidance. This implies that government control improves corporate governance by balancing opportunistic and efficiency-based tax avoidance.

This paper provides substantial practical implications since using the strategy of reducing taxes through RPT will result in greater tax savings at the business group level. Therefore, RPT is beneficial for enhancing business efficiency. Furthermore, government control increases corporate governance quality, which could lead to balancing tax aggressiveness activity.

Using a unique setting for RPT reporting in Taiwan, this paper divides RPT into eliminated and non-eliminated RPT. The findings offer significant insight for policymakers, investors and managers regarding the utilization of RPT to enhance efficiency in business groups. Additionally, this paper highlights the role of government control in preserving a harmonious balance in tax planning practices.

This paper aims to examine the effects of corporate governance mechanisms (board chairman independence, board independent director meeting attendance, audit committee size and audit committee meetings) on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) and its individual component disclosures of listed firms in Saudi Arabia.

The study used unbalanced panel data obtained from the Bloomberg data set over 11 years, from 2010 to 2020.

The findings indicate that board chairman independence (BCI) and audit committee size (AC size) have a significant negative and positive association with ESG disclosure, respectively. However, the results show that board independent director meeting attendance (BIMA) and audit committee meetings (AC meetings) do not significantly influence ESG disclosure. Regarding the individual dimensions (components), the results show that only BIMA has a significant negative association with environmental disclosure. Besides, only BCI and AC meetings have a significant positive association with social disclosure. Also, only BIMA and AC size have a significant positive and negative relationship with governance disclosure, respectively.

The study used a sample of 29 listed companies in Saudi Arabia. Each firm has at least four years of ESG disclosures. Besides, the paper considered only four corporate governance attributes, comprising two each for the board and audit committee.

The results provide insights to regulators, boards of directors, managers and investors to enhance ESG and its components’ reporting toward the sustainable operations and better performance of Saudi firms.

This study is among the few that provide empirical evidence on how some essential corporate governance attributes that have not been given adequate attention by prior studies (board chairman independence, board independent directors’ meeting attendance, audit committee size and audit committee meetings) influence not only ESG reporting as a whole but also its individual dimensions (components).

This study investigated how the financial expertise of the board of directors, risk management committee (RMC), audit committee (AC) and Shariá Supervisory Board (SSB) influences the risk-taking of Islamic banks.

The study utilized unbalanced panel data for a sample of 43 full-fledged Islamic banks from 15 countries over 12 years (2010–2021). We employed feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) and heteroskedastic panels corrected standard errors (HPCSE) regression regressions as the primary estimation methods and used a two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator for robustness checks.

The results indicate that board financial expertise decreases insolvency and credit risks. Similarly, AC financial expertise and SSB financial expertise reduce insolvency and portfolio risks but increase credit risk. In contrast, RMC financial expertise raises insolvency risk. The remaining relationships are statistically insignificant.

Due to the lack of disclosure regarding the educational and professional background of the board and committee members in the annual reports of some Islamic banks, this research used a sample of only 43 full-fledged Islamic banks operating in fifteen countries from 2010 to 2021.

The findings can assist both local and international regulators in revising corporate governance codes and risk management guidelines in such a way as to ensure that the financial experts appointed to the board, AC, RMC and SSB, are capable of controlling excessive risk-taking behavior in Islamic banks.

This study contributes to the literature by providing comprehensive empirical evidence that corporate governance financial expertise influences the risk-taking behavior of Islamic banks.

Innovation is necessary to ensure consistent economic growth and to meet the global competition. In view of this, the purpose of this study to check the effect of governance quality as a tool for fostering innovation performance.

The empirical analysis was arranged on 20 year’s (2000–2019) data from South Asian economies. Subject to the existence of cointegration, the authors use the fully modified ordinary least square model for regression analysis and check the robustness through robust least square model.

The empirical findings infer that all dimensions of governance have a positive significant impact on both research and development expenditures and trademark applications jointly known as innovation performance. In addition, the empirical analysis discloses the positive effect of all control variables, including FDI inflow, banking sector development, economic growth, ease of doing business index and government subsidies on innovation activities. The analysis confirms the “grease the wheel” role of governance in fostering innovation.

It is apparently recommended to strengthen the exercise of better governance to harvest better innovation scores.

This study advocates the positive role of individual dimensions of governance recommended by existing literature and complements the literature by jointly exploring the impact of all governance dimensions on overall innovation performance.

The objective of the research is threefold. First, the study examines the fiscal policy – income inequality nexus in SA. Second, the study addressed the potential asymmetric effects in fiscal policy – income inequality nexus in SA (i.e. we assessed the effects of fiscal policy on income inequality at different quantiles of the income inequality) using secondary data from 1980–2020. Third, the study also identifies the optimal fiscal policy instrument that achieve the greatest distributional objectives.

The study adopts the traditional ordinary least square (OLS) and the innovative Quantile estimation techniques.

The study found that fiscal policy marginally reduces the income inequality at the lower quantiles (t: 0.05). Specifically, the results show that government spending on health and education reduces income inequality at the lower quantiles (t: 0.05; t: 0.25), albeit exerts a statistically weak impact. On the other hand, the results show that at the upper quantiles, fiscal policy has no statistically significant impact on income inequality. However, we do not find either direct or indirect tax to have any impact on income inequality at any conventional level of significance. This suggests that government spending on health and education have the greater potential to reduce income inequality in South Africa. The research and policy implications are discussed.

The study addressed the asymmetric phenomenon in income inequality-fiscal policy nexus in South Africa.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2023-0956

This study investigated how working capital management (WCM) influences the profitability of listed halal food and beverage companies.

The study utilized a sample of 56 listed halal food and beverage companies operating in Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Unbalanced panel data were generated from the Bloomberg database between 2008 and 2021. Besides, the study employed the two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) technique for the estimation, which can address the models' endogeneity, heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation problems. Also, feasible generalized least square (FGLS) regression was applied to check the robustness of the results.

The study revealed that the cash conversion cycle (CCC) and accounts receivable period (ARP) significantly reduced firm profitability. Also, the inventory conversion period (ICP) significantly reduced return on assets (ROA) but insignificantly influenced return on equity (ROE). However, the results showed that the accounts payable period (APP) significantly increased firm profitability. These findings are robust to the results obtained by applying FGLS regression.

The study utilized a sample of only the listed halal food and beverage firms that operate in Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The study suggests that the management of listed halal firms should adopt an aggressive policy in managing their working capital in order to enhance their financial performance. This could be attained by lowering CCC when ARP and ICP are reduced and APP is increased.

This study contributes to the literature by providing cross-country empirical evidence showing how working capital and its components affect the financial performance of firms that solely produce or buy and sell halal food and beverage products in five countries.

This study aims to examine the relationship between mentorship, innovation and entrepreneurship performance in Africa’s largest economy. This study argues that mentorship and innovation play significant roles in driving entrepreneurship performance in the country. It explores the impact of mentorship on entrepreneurial development, including the transmission of knowledge, skills and networks.

This study analyzes the role of innovation in fostering entrepreneurial growth and competitiveness, particularly in the context of Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. The authors engaged data obtained from the Youth Enterprise with Innovation (2019) and made use of the propensity score matching.

The findings suggest that effective mentorship programs and innovative approaches can enhance entrepreneurial performance, promote economic growth and contribute to sustainable development in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy.

The literature on entrepreneurship in Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria, has mainly focused on factors such as access to finance, the business environment and government policies, with limited research on the role of mentorship and innovation in entrepreneurship performance. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on entrepreneurship in Nigeria, particularly on the role of mentorship and innovation in entrepreneurship performance.