Teaching Business Ethics in Africa: What Ethical Orientation? The Case of East and Central Africa

This paper starts off from what seems to be a difficulty of ethics in African Business today. For several years now Transparency International has placed some African countries high on its list of most corrupt countries of the world. The conclusion one draws from this assessment is that either African culture has no regard or concern for ethics, or that there has been a gradual loss of the concept of the ethical and the moral in contemporary African society. Equally problematic is the teaching and promotion of Business ethics in organizations. Western philosophical theories and systems alone have not succeeded in providing access to ethical life of people in modern Africa. This paper is an attempt to inject an orientation that takes into account African manners and customs, their religious convictions and their understanding of the world as a whole, in the teaching of Business Ethics. East and Central Africa have been selected due to their common lingua franca, Kiswahili, and the fact that the author has more teaching experience within that region.     

Regional dimensions of structural adjustment in West Africa

Structural adjustment programmes and regional integration schemes have been pursued simultaneously in West Africa for about a decade now, yet no serious systematic effort has been made by any agency or donor to explore effective ways in which the two might be interwoven and made mutually reinforcing. Professor Ezenwe examines the interrelationships and apparent conflicts between these two development strategies.     

Exploring consumer ethics in Ghana,West Africa

Consumer ethics is a growing area of research that focused almost exclusively on consumers in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe and Asia. In this paper, we introduce an African element to the consumer ethics discourse by drawing on survey responses from over 300 Ghanaian consumers to explore their ethical beliefs and judgements. We analysed these data using regression techniques. Our findings show that Ghanaian consumers exhibit lower levels of ethics compared with their America counterparts, especially when the unethical actions facilitate the achievement of their goals. While Ghanaian consumers recognize the value of moral rules, they are prone to suspending their ethical positions as they deem necessary in a particular context. Implications for marketing strategy and future research are discussed.     

Trade and growth in West Africa in the 1980s

The classical school regards international trade as the main engine of growth. But modern empirical studies have failed to show any simple and generally consistent correlation between foreign trade statistics and macro-economic aggregates such as savings, Investment, consumption and growth¹. The more generally accepted view is that development through trade where it occurred was partly the consequence of favourable internal environment. What are the prospects for growth through trade in West Africa in the 1980s?     

The determinants of director remuneration in West Africa: The impact of state versus firm-level governance measures

This paper contrasts firm-level as opposed to state-level governance on directors self-rewarding behaviour in West Africa. Director self-reward or compensation is measured through fixed base salary as well as total remuneration which provides a conservative estimate of the full private benefits of control of directors. Using a unique hand-collected sample of 56 IPO firms from across West Africa from 2000 to 2012, I find that larger board sizes have less effective governance mechanisms while enhanced expropriation of private benefits of control is closely associated with lower government promotion of private sector policies, media and analyst freedom and corruption control.     

深拓西亚非洲机电市场

西亚非洲地区幅员广大,总面积约3443万平方公里,包括72个国家和地区,总人口超过9亿。2002年该地区外贸额约6216亿美元,占全球外贸总额的5％,GDP总额11288亿美元,约占全球GDP总额的4％。 这一地区国家与我国政治上长期友好,经贸关系也进入了快速、全面、稳定的发展阶段。西亚非洲地区国家自身的经济发展不平衡,差距明显,只有以     

Entrepôt Trade and Smuggling in West Africa: Benin,Togo and Nigeria

Official trade statistics indicate very little intra‐African trade, but this is often because of the prevalence of unrecorded trade, particularly smuggling. This paper explores smuggling from Benin and Togo into Nigeria. Nigeria has very high import tariffs and bans on certain products. Togo and Benin have deliberately maintained low import barriers to facilitate an Entrepôt role vis‐à‐vis Nigeria and land‐locked Sahelian countries. Togo competes at a geographic disadvantage relative to Benin for access to the Nigerian market and compensates with lower transit taxes. The volume and composition of cross‐border trade is analysed using data obtained from Benin and Togo customs authorities, as well as interviews with traders and customs officials in both countries. Benin and to a lesser extent Togo are the origin of a very large volume of transshipment of precisely those products which are heavily protected in Nigeria, such as used cars, cloth and rice. It is common knowledge in Benin and Togo that these imports, although declared for domestic consumption or transit to other countries, are in fact overwhelmingly intended for Nigeria. Smuggling is a major source of income and employment in Benin and Togo, but provides a fragile and unreliable foundation for economic development.     

The horn of Africa and international relations

All the countries abutting on the Red Sea and on the Gulf of Aden as well as the East African coast will gain in economic, political, and strategic importance as soon as the Suez Canal is reopened to shipping. The present article discusses the situation in an important subregion of this area, the so-called Horn of Africa which owes an eminent position under political and strategic aspects.     

The Chinisation of Africa: The Case of Angola

(1249) Renato Aguilar and Andrea Goldstein The relationship between the Asian Drivers and Angola has attracted an attention only paralleled by the one surrounding interactions with Sudan. Three closely related perspectives are important. First, the rapid expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies has sustained the world price for oil, of which Angola is the second‐largest producer in sub‐Saharan Africa. In the process, China has also become Angola’s third‐largest trading partner, with a sizeable trade surplus favouring Angola. Second, from an international financing perspective, China’s keen interest to diversify the portfolio of assets in which to invest its huge international reserves is only matched by Angola’s need to find alternatives to normal and concessional sources of international financing, from which it is excluded due to the lack of progress in negotiating with the Bretton Woods institutions. Third, all these issues must be understood in the broader and possibly more complex scenario of the political economy of the relationship between Angola and the world. Because of the country’s size and control over huge oil resources, the growing presence of China in Angola has reverberations across the rest of Africa. And Angola has also joined OPEC in late 2006.     

西方投资理论及其新发展

西方投资理论发展至今经历了三个主要阶段：第一阶段,以20世纪30年代凯恩斯的宏观经济学革命为标志;第二阶段,以20世纪60年代第一、二次华尔街革命为标志;第三阶段,20世纪80年代后的近几十年,关于投资的理论在微观领域内迅疾发展,＂行为心理学＂、＂博弈论＂的思想被移植到投资研究的领域内,使以往经典的＂完全市场＂和＂理性人＂的假设被颠覆,投资理论的研究自此又翻开了新的一页。     

The structure of German trade with Africa

The structure of Germany’s trade with Africa differs substantially from the general pattern of its foreign trade relations. But there is a further pecullarity in this trade. Each of the African countries concerned has a very specific importance as a trading partner. The following article reviews the characteristic features of African-German trade relations.     

The Black Sea economic cooperation zone

The political changes in eastern Europe have opened up new opportunities for trade among the countries surrounding the Black Sea, and especially between the former socialist countries and Turkey, the country with the longest Black Sea coastline. The following article describes the present stage of economic cooperation reached by the countries concerned and analyzes the prospects for the future.     

The labour situation in South Africa

The following article examines the situation of the black workers in South Africa from the legal and institutional points of view and describes what their situation is like in practice.