We have performed a focalized investigation to explore how corporate social responsibility (CSR) moderates the relationship between corporate governance and firms’ financial performance. We applied a panel regression to examine this relationship from a sample of 3400 Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) listed firms, based on yearly observations from 2009 to 2018. Our results show that the presence of female directors on the board is associated with improved firms’ performance and that corporate social responsibility (CSR) moderates this relation, thus indicating that sharing strategic decision-making with female board members revealed a better relationship between CSR and firms’ financial performance. Our findings showed that foreign institutional investors positively influenced firms’ financial performance and that CSR moderates the relation between foreign institutional shareholders and the firm’s financial performance. Supported by corporate governance theories, such as resource dependence and stakeholder theory, our results help to better understand the nexus among corporate governance, firms’ performance and corporate social responsibility. These findings are advantageous to government departments in emerging countries in terms of encouraging marketing practitioners and participants to implement CSR practices and change the attitude associated with CSR implications. This study highlighted the problems of the foreign institutional investors’ scheme, which was the main contribution to the financial market reform of China after 2003. These findings offer significant implications to corporate affairs executives and managers, practitioners, academicians, state officials, and policy-makers, and might provide China with the opportunity to extend its market liberalization to the global markets. This research also contributes to the existing literature, which investigates how CSR moderates the relationship between corporate governance and firms’ financial performance in the Chinese market context.

This study examined the strength of CEOs’ influence on CSR in Chinese listed companies. The companies chosen belonged to the non-financial sector and were listed in the Shanghai stock exchange from 2010 to 2019. The data was extracted from audited annual reports of companies including the director’s report, chairman’s statements, and notes to financial statements. We applied OLS regression as a baseline methodology to determine the extent and impact of CEO power on CSR disclosures. The results indicated significantly negative relationship between the CEOs’ power and CSR disclosure. Our results showed that separate roles of chairman and CEO can reduce agency problems and increase the CSR disclosures. This study is of importance for regulators, as it enforces the view that regulators and policymakers should continue efforts to improve corporate governance practices and CSR reporting in China, as these changes will not only improve the performance of companies but also befit society at large.

This study aims to examine the impacts of firm constraints and proactive innovation on firm performance, using a sample of 3504 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam from 2011–2015. Our findings suggest that technological innovations in general are beneficial to firm performance, increasing firm sales and profits. Further filtering innovations into two categories of proactive and reactive ones, we find that reactive innovation negatively affects firm performance, consistent with the view that proactive entrepreneurial behavior is a highly sought-after characteristic or a valuable resource for a firm as specified in resources-based theory. Finally, our result implies that if firms have low constraint or have sufficient resources, proactive strategies should be the choice if firms seek to improve their performance.

The workforce of growing globalization has led to a large number of expatriate employees working overseas for short term employment. An expatriate assignment is strongly correlated with a variety of difficulties that affect expatriates’ adjustment abroad. Therefore, the aim of this article is: (1) to determine the challenges encountered by Chinese expatriates in Pakistan and (2) to determine the role of cross-cultural training for a successful international assignment. The paper adopts a qualitative approach by conducting semi-structured interviews; the interviews were conducted with 22 males and eight females, forming a total of 30 Chinese employees with the average age of 34.5 years, working in different Chinese organizations in Pakistan in 2018. The findings of this study revealed that the most significant challenges faced by Chinese expatriates in Pakistan were cultural differences and language barriers in both work and non-work factors, whereas, those Chinese expatriates who were trained through formal and informal learning techniques could facilitate their cross-cultural adjustment.

This study aims to examine the interrelationships among environmental strategy, environmental management accounting (EMA), environmental performance, and financial performance within manufacturing firms in Vietnam, a topic rarely addressed in previous research. Specifically, the research investigates the role of EMA use and environmental performance in mediating the relationship between environmental strategy and financial performance. Drawing on stakeholder theory, contingency theory, and the natural resource-based view theory, this study develops and tests a serial mediation model to explain how EMA use and environmental performance link environmental strategy to improved financial performance Data were collected from 198 manufacturing firms in Vietnam. The research employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS software for data analysis. The findings reveal that environmental strategy positively influences both EMA use and environmental performance. Moreover, EMA and environmental performance act as significant mediators, positively influencing financial performance. This study focuses on manufacturing firms in Vietnam, an emerging market, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to other geographic contexts. Cultural differences, variations in environmental standards, and different levels of economic development across countries may influence the relationship between environmental strategies and performance outcomes, suggesting that the results may not be universally applicable. This research is the first to explore the interconnections between environmental strategy, EMA use, environmental performance, and financial performance in manufacturing firms in Vietnam. It provides valuable theoretical and practical insights for managers and policymakers, highlighting the importance of integrating environmental strategies into business operations.

This study suggests a composite index of financial inclusion (FI) for financial development, based on three key dimensions: penetration, availability, and usage in lower-middle income countries. The methodology uses principal component analysis PCA to exploit a composite index of financial inclusion and test its impact of new components on financial development. On the secondary data of financial access from the sources of FAS-IMF and WB-Findex, the research result is found that there are two new components of overall financial inclusion: the traditional financial inclusive index (TFI) includes three traditional dimensions: traditional penetration (TP), traditional availability (TA), and traditional usage (TU); and the digital financial inclusive index (DFI) includes three digital dimensions: digital penetration (DP), digital availability (DA), and digital usage (DU). The research findings give the empirical evidence that the digitalized level of financial inclusion is quite weak in lower-middle income countries. The research contributes to the methodology of building a composite index of financial inclusion with optimal weights of dimensions and traditional-digital financial inclusive indexes.