Responsiveness of rural development to budget management attributes: Evidence from Ogun State, Nigeria

This study focused on corporate governance and performance of selected Nigerian multinational firms from 2012 to 2016. Specifically, the study focused on the effect of board size, activism and committee activism on return on asset and firm growth rate. Secondary data collected from four multinational firms were analyzed via static panel estimation techniques. While board size and board activism exerted significant negative impact on return on asset, committee activism exerted insignificant impact. The results of the study further showed that board size and board activism exert insignificant negative impact on firm’s growth rate, while committee activism insignificantly spurs firm’s growth rate. Decisively, discoveries from this study reflect that corporate governance has significant negative impact on return on asset, but has insignificant influence on the growth rate of Nigerian multinational firms. Based on these findings, the authors recommended that corporate governance dynamics in firms world over should be reconsidered, such that it gives credence to more than just numbers of persons or meetings held, but the main reasons and deliberations in such meetings. It was also recommended that excessive increase in magnitude or frequency of meetings held by board of directors cum committee should be avoided.

Academic resilience and emotional intelligence are considered important personal resources for furthering students’ academic performance. However, many educational organizations seem to trivialize the performance implications of these constructs in teachings and curriculum. Consequently, it can decrease not just their academic performance but also their employability, as they lack the generic competencies to adapt and survive in a stressful context. Even so, empirical evidence on integrating academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance remains unexplored in the Nigerian university context. Therefore, the study aimed to investigate the linkages between academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance in Nigeria. The partial least square (PLS) modeling method was utilized for testing the stated hypotheses with data collected from 179 final year undergraduate students in the regular B.Sc. Business Administration and B.Sc. Marketing program at Delta State University, Nigeria. From the PLS results, the study reported that academic resilience was positively related to emotional intelligence (β = 0.125, p = 0.007), academic resilience (β = 0.231, p = 0.000) and emotional intelligence (β = 0.260, p = 0.000) were positively related to academic performance, and emotional resilience mediated the positive relationship between academic resilience and academic performance (β = 0.057, p = 0.005). While academic resilience predicted academic performance, it also predicted emotional intelligence, which affected academic performance significantly and positively.

Tax compliance is a major contemporary debate surrounding corporate taxation in the business world. The tax avoidance issue, which remains an ethical problem for companies, has been a general concern in developed and developing countries alike. The main problem of this study is a non-tax compliance behavior of the corporate organization taxpayers in Nigeria. This study examined the influence of tax fairness on the tax compliance behavior of listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. The paper adopted a survey research method, and four hundred (400) copies of the questionnaire were administered to the selected manufacturing companies of both consumer and industrial goods sectors. The Laffer Curve Theory underpinned this study and Correlation Analysis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Multiple Regression Analysis were also employed. The study found that there is a significant level of tax compliance among the listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. The study also shows that the corporate taxpayer’s perception of fairness of –2.765 (0.006) has a significant impact on corporate taxpayers’ willingness to pay taxes and tax knowledge of 4.601 (0.000) significantly influenced tax compliance. Based on tax knowledge, the study recommends that tax authorities must improve the knowledge of taxpayers and tax collection agents through programs, initiatives, and training on tax awareness.