Adegbola Otekunrin

The essence of local government as contained in the Nigerian Constitution is bringing government closer to the people and make them feel the impact of governance. This study examined the responsiveness of rural development to three of the attributes of public budgeting (effectiveness, openness, and adequacy) in selected local governments in Ogun State, Nigeria. The objective was to establish the functional association and interconnectedness between the explained and explanatory variables. Data were gathered through the administration of a five-point Likert scale questionnaire distributed to 800 respondents in 8 local governments in Ogun States, out of which 348, representing 43.5%, were retrieved and used for analysis. Both descriptive statistics and ordinary least square regression were utilized in the study. The result showed that three explanatory variables, namely budget effectiveness, budget openness, and budget adequacy, are positively related to rural development, although the impact of budget adequacy was shown to be insignificant. The implication is that the effectiveness of budget management and the openness of the budget in terms of transparency and accountability are more responsive and influential determinants of rural development than the adequacy of the budget estimates. The paper, therefore, recommended improvement in budget openness through more consultations and accessibility to budget information by the public as well as monitoring of projects and programs within the local council to engender development and add value to the rural dwellers.

The introduction of integrated reporting aims to solve the drawbacks of corporate reporting practices and make companies accountable to their immediate environment, including other stakeholders affected by company operations in generating returns to investors. This study investigated whether there is a statistically significant relationship between integrated reporting and investor returns. Ex post facto research design was used. Ten (10) Deposit Money Banks were sampled using a purposive sampling technique. Data were extracted from the annual reports of the selected banks, and the unweighted method of content analysis was used to extract integrated reporting data with the checklist from the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRF, 2021). The integrated reporting disclosure index was used as a proxy for integrated reporting. Proxies used for investor returns are the price-earnings ratio, dividend per share, and market price per share. The results indicate that the integrated reporting disclosure index is positively related with the price-earnings ratio, dividend per share and market price per share, with coefficients of 56.3403, 1.5240 and 16.6122, respectively, for the three (3) models. This implies that an increase in practicing integrated reporting will increase market price per share, dividend per share and price-earnings ratio. Likewise, the integrated reporting disclosure index has a significant effect on dividend per share and price-earnings ratio with p-values 0.000 and 0.001, respectively. However, the disclosure index has an insignificant effect on market price per share, with a p-value 0.184. This study concluded there is a statistically significant relationship between integrated reporting and investor returns.

Acknowledgment
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