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The study investigates empirically the impact of foreign direct investment inflows to firms on firm value in South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana using listed firms. In order to control for any possible endogenity problems in the model, the study adopts a robust System Generalized Method of Moments to investigate the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and firm value (measured using Tobin's Q and ROA) from the period of 2008 to 2019. From the findings, it is established that FDI has a positive significant impact on firm value in all the three countries (South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana). This positive relationship between FDI and firm value in the selected countries can be attributed to; technological transfer, managerial transfer, innovation transfer and skills transfer in favor of the host firms through inflows of FDI. This study does not only serve as a reference work for subsequent investigations into the impact of FDI on firm value in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it also serves as a guide to policy makers on the impact of FDI inflows to firm value in the region. It is one of the pioneering works that comprehensively examines the effect of FDI inflow on firm value among firms in Sub-Saharan African and also controls for endogeneity effects in the panel set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although West African nations are flourishing economically of late, they still have environmental issues due to the high rate of emissions in the bloc. Despite the worsening environmental condition, there have been limited studies on the causal agents of this situation in the region. Therefore, drawing strength from the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their targeted impacts of 2030, this study explored the nexus between financial development and environmental sustainability in West Africa (WA) for the period 1990 to 2016. The cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) estimator alongside the cross-sectionally augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) and the cross-sectional augmented error correction (CAEC) estimators were engaged to examine the elastic effects of the explanatory variables on the explained variable and from the results, financial development was harmful to environmental sustainability in WA through high carbon emissions. Also, control variables foreign direct investments, energy consumption, industrialization, and population growth were detrimental to the sustainability of the environment. On the causal connections amid the series, a unidirectional causality from financial development and population growth to carbon emissions was uncovered. Also, feedback causalities between foreign direct investments and carbon emissions, between energy consumption and the effluents of carbon, and between industrialization and environmental pollution were unraveled. Based on the findings, the study recommended among others that the countries should integrate environmental welfare objectives into their financial development policies. Also, the nations should ensure that their citizens have access to energy that is affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern (SDG 7). Finally, improvement in energy efficiency, sustainable infrastructure, and good use of resources (SDG 12) should be promoted by the nations. The above recommendations if seriously taken into consideration will help the region to combat climate change and its impacts, which is the focus of SDG 13. The main flaw of this exploration was the lack of data for some specific time periods. Therefore, in future when such data become available, similar investigations could be carried out to confirm the robustness of the study's results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates empirically the impact of inward FDI on host firm Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance in South Africa. The data used for the study was sourced from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Public Investment Corporation Governance Survey index for a period of 3 years ranging from 2011 to 2013. The study employs Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) and Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) to estimate the effect of FDI on CSR and thus addresses contemporaneous cross-correlations across the panel cross-sections as well as endogeneity between FDI and CSR. It is established from the study that FDI has a strong positive impact on firm CSR performance. When CSR is decomposed further into its major components, FDI positively impacts social and environmental components but has no impact on governance components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates empirically the impact of innovation on firm productivity in Ghana. In examining the relationship between innovation and firm productivity, two robust Instrumental Variable estimation techniques (Two Stage Least Squares and Optimal Generalized Methods of Moment) have been employed so as to cure any endogeneity problems that may exist in our models. The study realized that innovation impacts positively on the productivity of firms. Both process and product innovation have strong positive relationship with firm productivity in Ghana. It is also noted that while most employees in Ghanaian firms have got formal education, less practical or on-job training is offered to the employees by the firms. This study does not only serve as a reference work for subsequent investigations on the impact of innovation on productivity in Ghana, but it also serves as a guide to policy makers on drafting innovation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]