Vol. 6, No. 1 (2018): Regular Issue

The increase in natural resources consumption by Nigerian companies has raised concern about environmental impact of such activities. Nigerian government and other stakeholders pressured these companies to be environmentally friendly or risk their legitimacy. This obliges the companies resort to environmental disclosure to counter the theat. However, the disclosure is doubted whether it is a true reflection of the performance. This is due to a green-wash problem, where those companies whose legitimacy is threatened present high-level of disclosure to avoid sanctions. Though, voluntary disclosure theory asserts that high-performing companies disclose quality environmental items to achieve favourable selection from the stakeholders. This study examined the relationship between the environment operational performance and environmental disclosure of the companies listed in the Nigerian Stock Exchange. A survey method and content analysis of the companies’ annual reports was used to obtain data on the performance and the disclosure. Where OLS, 2SLS and 3SLS regression analysis showed a significant negative relationship between the environment operational performance and overall environmental disclosure and disclosure level. However, there is no statistical evidence to support the relationship between the performance and disclosure quality. This study contributes to the understanding of the green-wash issue about environmental disclosure by the Nigerian companies. It unveils non-appreciation of quality disclosure by the companies to achieve selection preference. Also, the use of environment operational performance measure provides an alternative approach to the test of the relationships. The limitation of the study is hinged in using cross-sectional data and its small sample size.

Environmental management accounting (EMA) has emerged over last decades because of increasing awareness of the impacts of companies on their environment. There was a limited attention directed to the importance attached to EMA's techniques and the importance of benefits derived from EMA's techniques. Drawing off the contingency theory literature, the current study examined the relationship between the size, intensity of competition, type of industry, cost structure, and the importance attached to EMA's techniques and the importance of benefits derived from these techniques. Data was collected using a sample of 100 accountants in Bahrain. Replies were received from 36 accountants. The results indicated that there were significant relationships between size, type of industry, cost structure, and the importance attached to EMA's techniques. With regards to the benefits derived from EMA's techniques, the results indicated that the type of industry and cost structure was significantly influencing the importance of benefits of EMA's techniques. The study determined many potentials for future research including understanding factors influencing the allocation of environmental costs to products/services, and using other contextual variables to gain a better understanding of EMA in less developing countries.

As a big steel producer, China has a large number of steel consumption every year and it is still incredibly increasing now. The fast growth of steel consumption led to excessively production, which caused not only tons of material wastes but also seriously affect on economic and environment. Therefore, finding out and analyzing the driving force of steel consumption is an extremely importance research for reducing resource-consumption and pollutant-emission of steel industry. In this paper, the structure of steel consumption was established at first based on the bottom-up method. Further, the four factors closely related to steel consumption were identified by factor decomposition method. They are in-use stock of steel (Sn), average service life-span (Y), productivity per in-use stock of steel (H) and steel output per unit GDP (T). Next, the driving force of each factor was analyzed by their contribution rate to steel consumption of China. At the same time, the S-shaped model of growth, mathematical model and BP neural network model were used to extract four scenarios to simulate steel consumption. Results show that: (1) construction industry is the main industry of steel consumption, accounting for 50% of the total, and the rest of the industries is relatively low; (2) the driving force Sn of steel consumption gradually decreased while the rest factors (Y, H, T) on steel consumption increased every year within the research time. Especially, after 2009, the impact value of the four factors reached the same level of 25%; and (3) when the growth rate of GDP is keeping on 7%, steel output per unit GDP (T) will reach to 0.1248 t/104 RMB; the average service life-span of in-use stock of steel (Y) will increase to 8.4 years; and steel consumption will reach to 7.7×108 tons and the in-use stock of steel will be efficiently used.

The paper shows that the management and regulation of transboundary natural resources is carried out in most states from the point of view of the economic approach. At the same time, the requirements of ecological systems speak about the need to consider natural and territorial complexes as unified mechanisms that cannot be considered separately, but only in combination and in conjunction with each component that make up this ecological system. The authors show that such a perception of ecological systems inevitably leads to the fact that the issue of their safety appears in the framework of cooperation between two or more states. The subject of the study is environmental systems as an element of governance in the framework of supranational and interstate agreements. They are considered as an aggregate of natural resources and biological elements living in a given territory. The novelty of the study is the provision that the management of an ecological system in the territory of two or more states requires the development of not only global standards for the use and protection of ecological systems, but also to determine the feasibility of implementing management and economic cooperation mechanisms for the even development of transboundary ecological systems. Directions for further research are the possibility of organizing supranational regulatory documents that will allow the allocation of shared environmental systems and determine the possibility of the territories’ even development.

Based on attachment theory, this study aims to highlight the potential impact of customer’s emotional attachment in the context of online stores’ service recovery. Analyses of the data onto China, the findings indicate that once consumers have the emotional bond with a brand, the effect is much stronger than trust and service recovery fairness. It provides an insight to that online marketer should focus on the emotional attachment building and draw up the marketing strategy based on the connection, affection, passion, to create mutual memories for establishing the bond of emotion between online shopping stores and consumers.

The water resource shortage has caused intense contradictions among various water users; moreover, unfair and irrational water allocation may result in the economic loss, even the social instability. A risk-averse twostage stochastic programming model (RATSP) are developed for tackling this issue. The significant contribution made by the RATSP model is that it concerns the importance of the financial risk under each scenario, where the risk is expressed as the probability of occurrence in that benefit generated under each scenario is lower than predefined target profit. It can avoid possible suboptimal solutions caused by only considering the maximization of the expected value for all scenarios as an objective function. Moreover, the risk measure is incorporated into the objective function, leading a variety of solutions under various weight coefficients and target levels, which is suitable in analyzing the trade-off between the system economy and reliability. A case of water resources management system is used to reflect the applicability and feasibility of this model. The obtained results demonstrate that the RATSP model can help decision makers gain in-depth insights into potential system risk, analyze the trade-off between system economy and stability, generate the stable water allocation schemes, and avoid the contradictions among users.

There is a growing number of companies expressing social concerns where environmental worries are also included. Even before legal obligation of environmental disclosures, companies already used to adopt an active stance to safeguard their reputation. However, risk events may have negative impacts on companies’ legitimacy, making it necessary to implement strategies to repair/recover the damaged reputation. This study analyses the annual reports from 2001 to 2011 of the largest Por-tuguese oil company - Galp Energia - in the view of the occurrence of negative events, which, consequently, may have affected the company's reputation. Empirically, legitimacy theory can explain the implementation of strategies to repair reputation. Within this context, most of the existing research is based on common-law countries, with little literature grounded on code-law countries, such as Portugal. Findings have shown that Galp Energia has great concerns about the external perception of society. The company acts immediately after risk events, implementing strategies to minimise the risk impact, especially through the use of corrective actions.