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Purpose: The 2030 Agenda and the sustainable development goals (SDG) have gained considerable attention in research and public debate. This calls for accounting research on the subject of SDG disclosure. Based on this premise, this paper aims to evaluate and analyze the extent of SDG reporting by 80 listed firms from 8 selected African countries for the period of 2016 to 2018. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts a content analysis and survey method to evaluate the extent of SDG reporting by the selected African countries. This paper conducted content analysis through the use of the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) framework and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework to gauge the extent of firms' compliance with SDG reporting. Also, this paper uses the business reporting indicators for each SDG developed by GRI to determine the compliance level of the selected firms regarding SDG reporting. The survey was targeted at the big four audit firms (PwC, KPMG, Ernst and Young and Deloitte and Touche). Findings: The evaluation of SDG disclosure by the 80 listed firms in Africa is still at a very low level except for South African firms. Also, the findings of the business reporting indicators for each SDG target show that most of the firms show little or no concern to report on SDG activities. The result of the research survey indicates that voluntary disclosure, lack of management commitment, lack of regulatory enforcement and cost implications account for low SDG disclosure by the selected African firms. Research limitations/implications: This study fails to consider the qualitative research approach in determining the extent of SDG disclosure in Africa, as the study did not allow respondents to freely express their opinion on SDG disclosure, as a large part of the survey used close-ended questionnaires. Practical implications: This study's findings call for clear responsibility and a strong drive for SDG performance from corporate institutions in Africa. While the overall responsibility rests on the government, the actualization of SDG cannot be achieved without support from corporate organizations. The empirical approach used in this study emphasizes the need for corporate organizations to embrace sustainable practices and to integrate SDG information into their reporting cycle. Originality/value: This study contributes to growing literature in the area of corporate reporting, sustainability reporting and SDG research in Africa and other emerging economies. Also, this study provides original insight into the contribution of accounting research toward the achievement of SDG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese state/capitalist programme of transnational infrastructure construction initiated in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, Chinese banks extended hundreds of billions of dollars –principally across Asia, but also Europe and Africa – for transportation and energy networks. Recently released statistics, however, suggest that project lending for the BRI collapsed from 2016 onwards. Our paper examines the reasons for this contraction through a case-study of the BRI in Africa. We contend that the lending contraction resulted from political and economic contradictions generated by this form of international interconnection, including the types of debt traps it helped create. This outcome is explained partly by the fact that the BRI is simultaneously a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. Whereas the balance of economic risks is arguably skewed against borrowers (in some cases leading to debt traps), from a geopolitical perspective, the Chinese state also seeks to expand influence in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. This creates counter-pressure on further expansion of such financing, which, complemented by domestic economic implications of loan failure, helps to explain the contraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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• Discretionary or ex gratia payouts are widespread in parametric insurance programs. • Payouts attempt to secure social license to operate despite contractual basis risk. • Discretionary payouts obscure and entrench insurers' market power. • Attempts at conciliation often stoke further demands from aggrieved collectivities. • Geospatial monitoring alone cannot resolve questions of post-disaster distribution. The past decade has seen the dramatic proliferation of geospatial tools to remotely monitor, measure, and transfer weather and climate risk, particularly in the Global South. These "parametric" tools are calculative market devices used to commodify risk and facilitate its distantiated exchange via insurance markets. Yet the environmental estimates they generate are frequently wrong, sometimes grossly so. This paper investigates what happens after calculative market devices fail, analyzing so-called ex gratia ("from grace") practices in which insurers make payouts to aggrieved clients even when none are due under contractual terms. Though these payments are commonly deployed to dispel discontent, these "public secrets" of the industry have gone unnoticed in insurance scholarship. This paper documents numerous ex gratia payouts in parametric programs across Africa, disputing the myth of autonomous insurance markets that function according to formal, transparent rules administered by dispassionate calculative devices. Instead, these "discretionary" monetary transfers reintroduce human decision making in informal, black-boxed ways, cloaking the inadequacy of the parametric contracts they shore up. Far from incidental, I argue that these practices have been constitutive of the parametric insurance market's persistence and expansion. Though ex gratia payments sometimes give rise to negotiations over indemnification with aggrieved collectivities, these unfold on insurers' terms, informalizing power and delegitimizing complaint. The growing emphasis on parametric insurance as a tool for climate adaptation makes it all the more important to excavate the mechanics and politics of ex gratia, and to relinquish expectations that geospatial algorithms alone can resolve questions of post-disaster redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, tobacco use claims millions of lives every year. This has necessitated policy responses including tax measures aimed at reducing the consumption of tobacco. Nonetheless, opponents of tobacco taxation posit that, it may hurt economic growth. This study, therefore, examines the effect of tobacco taxation on economic growth in 38 African countries from 2008 to 2018. The system generalised method of moments (GMM) regression is used as the estimation technique. The findings show that, tobacco taxation enhances economic growth both in the short‐ and long‐run periods, especially, through its effect on population health. Thus, African governments should be confident when increasing tobacco tax because, it has an added advantage of propelling economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]