The impact of COVID-19 on firm risk and performance in MENA countries: Does national governance quality matter?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Almustafa H
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9901813 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Independent of different national conditions, an indisputable fact is that the worldwide governments should play a role in fighting the ongoing COVID-19. To make clear the determinants of government response to tackle COVID-19, I investigate the impact of governance quality. To do so, I newly create an overall governance index based on six dimensions of Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) from the World Bank to proxy governance quality. I regress the overall governance index with controls on the stringency index from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker database. Using pooled and panel data models with individual and time fixed effects, I find that the relationship between governance quality and policy stringency for 339 days across 163 countries is significantly nonmonotonic. Countries with middle governance quality select a high level of policy stringency in contrast to those with high and low governance quality. I also find that policy stringency significantly increases when daily new cases increase. The findings highlight the role of governance quality in deciding the stringency level of public health policies.
| S-EPMC9180495 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Using comprehensive flood data from China, we find a significant, negative impact of flooding on firm performance, which is mainly driven by unexpected flooding. We use multiple identification strategies to address endogeneity concerns and find that the documented impact of flooding on firm performance is likely causal. The impact is more pronounced for firms with more tangible asset investment, firms located in cities with low government quality, firms facing tight financial constraints, firms controlled by non-government entities and firms with low geographic diversification. Flood-exposed firms react to the threat by altering their investment, financial, cash, payout and executive compensation policies. Finally, flooding also exerts a significant impact on local economic and employment growth.
| S-EPMC9278787 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Access to finance plays a central pillar on the sustainable firm growth of developing and developed nations. This study depicts the linkage between access to external finance, firm quality, and firms' performance as measured by labor productivity for sustainable small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs') development by employing the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and propensity score matching (PSM) techniques to alleviate the selection bias and endogeneity issue on Word bank enterprise survey (WBES) cross-sectional firm-level data of 3,196 Bangladeshi SMEs for 2007-2013 period. Empirical evidence linking access to external finance and labor productivity has been positive and significant. However, our finding explores a negative but significant relationship between exports and SME labor productivity. A further look into the results also exhibits no statistical significance in the interaction effect between firm quality and access to finance on labor productivity. Moreover, the study anticipates novel empirical support that, the disintegration effect of export sales between direct and indirect exports with labor productivity for credit-accessed firms, is also found statistically insignificant. Then, several policies are drawn from the results to gain international competitiveness, and to ensure more external finance channels for enhancing SMEs' performance and sustainable firm growth.
| S-EPMC9093049 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionImproving healthcare quality in low-/middle-income countries (LMICs) is a critical step in the pathway to Universal Health Coverage and health-related sustainable development goals. This study aimed to map the available evidence on the impacts of health system governance interventions on the quality of healthcare services in LMICs.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review of the literature. The search strategy used a combination of keywords and phrases relevant to health system governance, quality of healthcare and LMICs. Studies published in English until August 2023, with no start date limitation, were searched on PubMed, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and ProQuest. Additional publications were identified by snowballing. The effects reported by the studies on processes of care and quality impacts were reviewed.ResultsThe findings from 201 primary studies were grouped under (1) leadership, (2) system design, (3) accountability and transparency, (4) financing, (5) private sector partnerships, (6) information and monitoring; (7) participation and engagement and (8) regulation.ConclusionsWe identified a stronger evidence base linking improved quality of care with health financing, private sector partnerships and community participation and engagement strategies. The evidence related to leadership, system design, information and monitoring, and accountability and transparency is limited.
| S-EPMC10729209 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundDisease control involves multiple actions overtime to halt the spread of COVID-19. The role of a country's governance in slowing the spread of COVID-19 has not yet been well investigated.ObjectiveThis study aims to investigate the association between governance and the trend of COVID-19 incidence in countries with the highest prevalence. We hypothesized that countries with better governance are more likely to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 than countries with worse governance.MethodsWe analyzed 62 most prevalent countries with at least 10,000 accumulative confirmed cases from January 22 to June 15, 2020. Countries were further grouped into three different levels of governance (25 better governance, 24 fair governance, and 13 worse governance), identified outbreak and mitigation periods using the joinpoint regression model, and compared the number of days and average daily percent change in incidence in two periods by governance level using the one-way analysis of variance.FindingsThe average outbreak period in the 62 countries lasted 84.0 days. Sixty percent of countries (N = 37) had experienced outbreak periods, followed by a mitigation period. In contrast, the rest forty percent of countries (N = 25) still had a rising trend. In the outbreak period, better governance countries had a more rapid increase but a shorter outbreak period (71.2 days) than countries with fair (93.5 days) and worse (90.8 days) governance. Most countries with better governance (84.0%) revealed a declining trend in COVID-19 incidence, while such a trend was less than half of fair and worse governance countries (38.5%-41.7%).ConclusionsCountries with better governance are more resilient during the COVID-19 crisis. While the mitigation of COVID-19 is observed in most better governance countries, the incidence of COVID-19 is still surging in most fair and worse governance countries, and the possibility of a recurring epidemic of COVID-19 in countries cannot be ignored.
| S-EPMC7500241 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundNational governance may have influenced the response of institutions to the Covid-19 pandemic, being a key factor in preparing for the next pandemics. The objective was to analyze the association between excess mortality due to COVID-19 (daily and cumulative per 100 thousand people) and national governance indicators in 213 countries.MethodMultiple linear regression models using secondary data from large international datasets that are in the public domain were performed. Governance indicators corresponded to six dimensions: (i) Voice and Accountability; (ii) Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism; (iii) Government Effectiveness; (iv) Regulatory Quality; (v) Rule of Law and (vi) Control of Corruption. The statistical analysis consisted of adjusting a multiple linear regression model. Excess mortality due to COVID-19 was adjusted for potential confounding factors (demographic, environmental, health, economic, and ethnic variables).ResultsThe indicators Control of Corruption, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality and Rule of Law had a significant inverse association (p < 0.0001) with the estimated excess mortality in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Furthermore, the governance indicators had a direct significant association (p < 0.0001) with the vaccination variables (People_fully_vaccinated; Delivered population; The total number of vaccination doses administered per 100 people at the country level), except for the variables Vaccination policies and Administration of first dose, which were inversely associated. In countries with better governance, COVID-19 vaccination was initiated earlier.ConclusionBetter national governance indicators were associated with lower excess mortality due to COVID-19 and faster administration of the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
| S-EPMC10619274 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In recent years, there has been an ongoing, worldwide debate about the representation of females in companies. Our study aimed to meta-analytically investigate the controversial relationship between female representation on corporate boards and firm financial performance. Following a systematic literature search, data from 20 studies on 3097 companies published in peer-reviewed academic journals were included in the meta-analysis. On average, the boards consisted of eight members and female participation was low (mean 14%) in all studies. Half of the 20 studies were based on data from developing countries and 62% from higher income countries. According to the random-effects model, the overall mean weighted correlation between percentage of females on corporate boards and firm performance was small and non-significant (r = .01, 95% confidence interval: -.04, .07). Similar small effect sizes were observed when comparing studies based on developing vs. developed countries and higher vs. lower income countries. The mean board size was not related to the effect sizes in studies. These results indicate that the mere representation of females on corporate boards is not related to firm financial performance if other factors are not considered. We conclude our study with a discussion of its implications and limitations.
| S-EPMC4473005 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The recent pandemic has been the greatest catastrophic event in the last century that has left its irrevocable effect on the socio-economic and cultural environment. The current work presents a combined multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework of logarithmic percentage-change driven objective weighting (LOPCOW) and evaluation is based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method to enfold the early impact of COVID-19 on firm performance from fast moving consumer goods and consumer durables sectors in emerging market. Five aspects such as stock performance, dividend payout capability, sales and operational performance, financial stability and economic sustainability are considered for comparing 30 firms over seven consecutive financial years (FY 2013–14 to FY 2020–21). For aggregation of year wise rankings popular methods like Borda count and Copeland methods have been applied. A comparison of results of the LOPCOW-EDAS model with other MCDM methods has been made. It is noticed that the firms which held the overall top positions prior to COVID-19 suffer more afterward than the bottom performers. However, there has not been any major effect of COVID-19 on firms’ financial health and long-term growth prospect. The result shows significant reliability and stability as revealed by the comparative ranking and sensitivity analysis. The proposed framework shall enable the organizations for detailed performance analysis. Some of the policy and managerial implications are also discussed.
| S-EPMC9678210 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We infer market expectations regarding the relationship between firm internationalization and the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic by using a novel approach to decompose global stock prices into their short- and long-term value components. In general, firms with a greater proportion of foreign assets show greater losses in the long-term value component, suggesting investor expectations of higher supply-chain restructuring costs for such firms. Also, investors appear to have priced in the likely permanent benefits of such restructuring for firms from emerging Asian economies, as these economies may be well-placed as alternative sourcing bases to China.
| S-EPMC8251430 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesThis study aimed to explore the relationship between national governance and country response to the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries, to support preparedness for the next pandemic. We conducted a statistical analysis of 116 countries, examining the relationship between speed of initial response and measures of national governance.Study designObservational study, with individual countries as the unit of analysis.MethodsWe used logistic regression to look for associations between quicker initial government response and four national governance indicators: Government Effectiveness, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Voice and Accountability, and Corruption Perceptions Index.ResultsA quicker initial government response was associated with countries with higher Government Effectiveness (OR 13.92 95% CI 3.69-52.48, p < 0.001) and lower Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism (OR 0.23, 95% CI 0.09-0.57, p = 0.002). There was no relationship observed between speed of initial government response and Voice and Accountability or Corruption Perceptions Index. Other factors associated with quicker initial response were small population size, experiencing first COVID-19 case after the pandemic declaration, not having previous experience with SARS-CoV1 or MERS and not being an island nation.ConclusionsThis study shows that having higher state policy and implementation capacity, and lower political stability was associated with a quicker initial pandemic response. Limitations of this study include the use of crude national level indicators and broad categorisations of countries into quicker and slower responders. Deeper enquiry into the early decision-making processes taken at the national executive level within individual countries may help clarify the observed associations further.
| S-EPMC9420690 | biostudies-literature