This study aimed to examine whether government financial assistance influences the financial performance of state-owned enterprises. Commercial state-owned enterprises in South Africa that are listed under the Public Financial Management Act during the post-apartheid era from 1995 to 2017 were sampled. Government guarantees were measured as a dummy variable, while financial performance was measured by accounting measure: return on assets (ROA). Endogeneity issues were addressed, and data analysis was performed on an unbalanced panel using the two-step system GMM. The empirical evidence indicated that support by the government in the form of guarantees and subsidies has a significant negative effect on the financial performance of state-owned enterprises. This is an indication that continued government bailouts to poor performing state-owned enterprises exacerbates their poor financial performance and encourages these enterprises to become too reliant on government assistance, burdening the national fiscus. AcknowledgmentsThe author gratefully acknowledges the National Research Foundation of South Africa for the research grant and Dr Farai Kwenda for his supervision during the study.

Budgets are a compass and guiding light for businesses. Therefore, management and owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) must carry out suitable and precise capital budgeting activities and methods to ensure business longevity and progression. There is a high risk of SMEs failing soon after they are found, with one likely cause being poor management skills. Thus, the study aims to assess the management skills of the capital budgeting planning and practices of SMEs. The objective is to ascertain the influence of management skills and owners on current capital budgeting planning and practice. The study adopted the quantitative method by administering questionnaires to 108 owners and managers in the Springfield Industrial Park. The findings of the study indicate that owners and managers were solely responsible for decision-making. Secondly, owners and managers lacked the financial skills, ability to control and lead staff. The study was limited to owners and managers in the SMEs and therefore cannot be inferred to any other area or subject/s. Future studies can be conducted in other regions, of which a comparative study is recommended that owners and managers in SMEs improve their business knowledge, as well as upskilling their financial ability in the capital budgeting process. Thus, the implications of improving owners and manager’s business knowledge will lead to timeous, smarter, and informed decision-making. It is therefore recommended that owners and managers take up short courses to improve computer literacy and financial skills in business processes.

The economic impact of carbon emissions in Africa is gaining traction in the extant literature. This study adopted Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) to concomitantly track data on carbon emissions versus economic growth in Africa from 2018 to 2022 providing evidence from a meta-analysis. Through database searches, 591 publications were identified. A machine learning algorithm called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used as a visualization technique for reporting trends in the eleven papers selected for the analysis. Identifying, evaluating, and summarizing the findings of all relevant individual studies conducted in Africa on the impact of economic growth on carbon emissions contributes to the existing body of knowledge. This study fills a critical gap by surveying the studies conducted in Africa in the last five years, implying that economic growth negatively and significantly triggers CO2 emissions in Africa. The debate on the economic impact of CO2 emissions in Africa, the most vulnerable continent to climate change, is elucidated. The findings tracked sources of data for carbon emissions in Africa. The results showed that although some studies reported a positive correlation (and some a negative correlation) between economic growth and carbon emissions, most studies concur that the economic impact of carbon emissions over a timeline can be explained by the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. Therefore, there is a dire need for African countries to strengthen economic growth without deteriorating their environment or having ecological footprint. Future research must assess whether this trend on the economic impact of carbon emissions in Africa continues. AcknowledgmentThe authors express their appreciation to the Durban University of Technology for providing the resources to conduct this study.

The roles of external auditors have been under the spotlight due to the strategic positions they occupy to ensure accountability by public sector managers. This study examines the role of the external auditors in the accountability regime of the Ghanaian local governance structure. The study analyzed the annual reports of the Auditor General (AG) on all the metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana from 2010 to 2018 through a content analysis method. The analysis revealed that Ghanaian audit activities had mainly focused on internal control effectiveness, cash management, contract management, revenue management, expenditure management, payroll management, and procurement management. However, the study found that the focus of the external auditors kept expanding as the years progressed. The evidence showed that the auditors excluded performance audits in their scope of work. The findings of the study further revealed that the MMDAs had recurring, repetitive, and common audit queries, comprising cash; procurement and stores; contract and tax irregularities. Besides, the audit recommendations were in response to the specific audit queries on the various financial and operational irregularities. Based on the analysis, the study concludes that the external auditing in Ghana has marginally contributed to accountability in the MMDAs. The study recommends that the scope of the external audit should include performance auditing.

Globally, water resource management has emerged as an important research area and is acknowledged as a crucial factor in achieving sustainable development goals. Despite its significance, water-related sustainability disclosures regarding water and water-related risks among companies are alarmingly weak. Many companies are not effectively measuring, managing, and disclosing their water-related risks. Hence, this paper aims to analyze water-related reporting and disclosure requirements of a sample of ten South African mining and non-mining companies with a high water profile, listed on the JSE Socially Responsible Investment Index. The companies’ level of compliance on water disclosure was assessed based on their reporting in the integrated and or annual reports. The findings revealed that sampled five mining companies performed poorly in terms of disclosure across the frameworks of awareness, disclosure, management, and leadership. On the other hand, the selection of five non-mining companies grasped the severe effect of the water crisis on their businesses and performed better in all the framework categories. The average score for the selection of mining companies was 65% compared to the 93% for the non-mining companies. Stakeholders need to focus on water governance processes that require improvement to enable the stakeholders to make better decisions on water management; subsequently, this is an area that needs to be addressed in future research.