We are witnessing a time of unprecedented human impact on the natural environment. Coral reefs, one of the most biologically diverse and productive ecosystems, are at the forefront of enduring these human impacts. Despite widespread recognition of coral reef degradation, counter measures have not reached a scale to offset the threat. The magnitude of this and other environmental issues call for a deeper understanding of the role the private sector can play in sustainable development. In response to environmental pressures and the shortcomings of global-scale governance, private sustainability governance initiatives have developed. In the last decade, these initiatives have flourished, resulting in a diversity of formats including third-party certification, consumer product transparency systems, and industry roundtables. In many industries, these programs compete to define the transformation and evolution of sustainability governance in an industry. This dissertation draws on a case study of the marine cultured-pearl industry to highlight the early adoption dynamics of private sustainability governance initiatives. The marine cultured-pearl industry provides an illuminating case study for the adoption of private governance, based on the potential strength of the positive environmental impact and farm presence in ecologically vulnerable coral reef areas. Yet despite these strengths, no formal sustainability initiatives have developed. This research project explores the early adoption of private governance initiatives through a mixed-methodological, case-study approach. The first study, a quantitative survey of US jewelry consumers, examines the impacts of environmental messages on perceptions of luxury value. The second study assesses the effect of networked legitimacy on producer perceptions in private governance initiatives. The final study investigates the impact of value chain structure on competing private governance initiatives. The research results provide evidence of a strong business case for the development of industry-wide sustainability initiatives and highlights distinctions between the rival private governance initiatives. The US jewelry consumer research shows that consumer messages featuring sustainability standards to protect coral reefs outperform third-party certification on luxury attributes. The marine cultured-pearl producer research highlights the legitimacy advantages of consumer product transparency when compared to third-party certifications. The value chain research indicates that, when compared to third-party certifications, consumer product transparency systems have characteristics that provide an advantage in addressing producer upgrading opportunities. Results from each of the three studies highlight the potential advantages of consumer product transparency systems over third-party certification initiatives in this and other settings. These results helped inform participatory action research to assess alternative pathways for private sustainability governance.

Research report presented to SBL, Unisa, Midrand. / The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of employees’ perceptions on the effectiveness of the board in the public sector. The units of analysis relevant to this research were the board of directors and the employees in the public sector. Thus, two questionnaires were designed: one for the board members, and the other for employees. The questionnaires were designed around various themes aimed at establishing the following: whether employees in the Public Sector perceive their Board of Directors to be effective, whether the Board of Directors in the Public Sector believe that their effectiveness is impacted by employee perceptions, and to determine what factors need to be in place to promote a positive relationship between employee perceptions and board effectiveness. The survey confirmed that the board members do believe that they are effective in the execution of their functions. The employees do agree that the board plays an important role in organisations, that organisations will be impacted negatively without the direction of the board, and that the board is conducting its roles and responsibilities as effectively as possible. In terms of whether the board of directors in the public sector believe that their effectiveness is impacted by the employees’ perceptions, the results from both the employees and members of the board were inclined towards ‘agree’ on the Likert scale. The survey also revealed that the prevalence of other factors in the organisation, (Transparency and Accountability, Communication, Stakeholder Relations Strategy, Board’s high Ethical Standard, Speedily Resolution of Labour disputes, Commitment to employee development, and Consistency in policy implementation), will have a high impact in their organisations, particularly in promoting a positive relationship between employee perceptions and board effectiveness.

1 Abstract The thesis constructs the indices of independence, transparency and accountability of the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) and European Central Bank (ECB). The results for the NBG are compared with the ECB and policy recommendations for the NBG based on ECB practice are suggested. The results of the analyses show that the ECB has achieved almost full independence and transparency in conducting the monetary policy but there are less favorable results in case of accountability. The NBG, even though revealed a gradual increase in its independence, transparency and accountability since 1998, still needs to put more effort into improving its autonomy, communication practices and responsibility.

This thesis examines the central banking transparency and financial stability communication. The main goal is to find the determinants of the updated Monetary policy transparency index and the index for financial stability trans- parency, which cover 110 countries during the period 2000-2011. We analyse the individual components of transparencies and perform regression models with the set of economic and political variables in order to find drivers of all aspects of transparency. As a basic observation we verified the increasing trend in both types of transparencies during last two decades. We found out that economi- cally well developed countries with flexible exchange rates, quality government and stable political institutions tend to be more open about their monetary policies. Moreover, high degree of monetary policy transparency and the occu- rance of past systemic banking crisis implies higher openness of central banks about financial stability issues. The drivers of Financial stability transparency index components display significant variations, especially variables like rule of law or past financial distress. It is concluded that financial stability trans- parency is still a young field of study and many central banks are still in the developing phase of learning. Keywords central banking,...

Duty to Publish Information (Abstract) I chose as my topic the obligation to publish official records, its legal grounds and connections with other areas. The analysis includes practical aspects and takes into account rapid changes in technology and the much slower development of ad- ministrative law institutes. In this frame I wanted to develop a procedural plan to make the public authority fulfill its duty to publish information, using legal means. I chose as my topic the duty to publish records, since I believe it to be the easist, most economical and effective way to make public records available to the citizens. This is currently a hot political topic, since new legislatation is being prepared in this area both in the Czech Republic and in the European Union, which is a response to the rapid technological progress. Nevertheless, the jurisprudence has devoted much less attention to the obligation to publish information than to disclosing the records upon a request to an individual. The thesis is divided to introduction, theoretical part, practical part and conclusion. The theoretical part deals with both the general regulation and with selected spe- cial cases of disclosure in domestic, EU and international regulation. I analyze and structure the legal regulation of mandatory publishing of records under...

Resumé Information duty of municipalities in selected countries In this thesis I have concentrated on the topic of transparency and openness of municipality bodies in the Czech republic, the Slovak republic and the Free State of Bavaria. The legislations in these countries have historically similar grounds, nevertheless, nowadays they show up many distinctions. My concentration was focused on the Czech legislation and legislative proposals, since the topics of open (digital) society, transparent politics and elements of direct democracy are being held as popular key words in the election struggles. The attempts of last three governments were heading almost to the same goals, showing that there is a need to adjust the processes of municipality bodies in terms of enabling citizens to participate and control easily the work of their representatives. These measures were meant to have the effect of decreasing the possibility of corruption at the municipal level. I have oriented on the following topics in comparing of the relevant legislations: the possibility of public to be present during sessions of municipal bodies; processes of preparation and invitations of citizens to these sessions and legal consequences in case the procedure would not be abided by; releasing of written and multimedia records of the...

This diploma thesis deals with the latest trends in international commercial arbitration. Specifically, it focuses on transparency in international investment arbitration and third-party funding in international commercial arbitration. The objective of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive interpretation of a gradual development of these trends and to also give potential Czech readers an idea about present hot topics in international arbitration coming mostly from foreign sources of bibliography. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter dedicates itself to defining arbitration in the context of various dispute resolution methods and provides its basic comparison to international arbitration. At the same time, it offers an insight into the advantages and disadvantages of this type of dispute resolution and it discusses the principles of confidentiality and privacy of arbitration proceedings. The second chapter is divided into two main parts. The first one is focused on defining key terms of the specific area of international investment arbitration, including different regimes of treatment of international investments in order to protect them. It also includes a detailed description of the most important sources of international investment law and further discusses ways to...

This dissertation consists of two essays: one looks at the time-varying relationship between earnings and price momentum, and the other looks at how liquidity and transparency affect the pricing differential between Chinese A-and Hong Kong H-share. The first essay presented in Chapter I investigates the time varying relationship between earnings momentum and price momentum. Using a Markov-switching framework, allowing for variation between high volatility and low volatility states, I find that price momentum is significantly more influenced by earnings momentum in the high volatility state. Further for price momentum I find that loser firms display a higher degree of differential response to earnings momentum across the low and high volatility states than winner firms. Limited financing and investor’s sensitivity to future investment opportunities might explain these two results. A further analysis indeed indicates that loser firms tend to be more financially constrained. Additionally, I investigate the relationship between investor sentiment and the two momentums and find that sentiment only has predictive power for price momentum profits in the low volatility state. Finally, the results are robust regardless of instrument variables. The second essay presented in Chapter 2 examines the impact of liquidity and transparency on the discount attached to H-shares from 2003 to 2011. The higher the relative illiquidity of an H-share, the more the H-share is discounted relative to the underlying A-share price. In addition, more actively traded A-shares and infrequently traded H-shares are associated with a higher H-share discount. Further, increases in the number of analysts following a firm, both in the A-and H- market, are accompanied by a lower H-share discount. Also, a firm with a higher percentage of A-share holdings by mutual funds is associated with a smaller H-share discount. Overall, the results provide support for the notion that liquidity and transparency affect the relative pricing of A- and H-shares.

In the first chapter, we analyze the role of market development, risk premium, and transparency as factors influencing the value of cash in firms listed as American Depository Receipts. Based on the method by Pinkowitz and Williamson (2002), our primary results are as follows. The market value of cash is greater on average for ADR firms than for U.S. firms, and within the ADR sample the value of cash is greater for firms based in less developed countries after 2007 financial crisis but not before. Together, the results suggest that the market development is especially important during more volatile periods. Further, the value of cash is negatively associated with the market risk premium. In addition, the relation between insider trading law execution and the value of cash is statistically insignificant for all periods, but corporate-level transparency as measured by the number of analysts is weakly negatively related to ADR firms’ cash value before 2007 after controlling for the fixed effects. The second chapter attempts to assess the relative importance of superior information and hedging in institutional trading in equity index futures in the Taiwan Futures market for the sample period of January to June 2012. Based on the methodology by Llorente, Michaely, Saar, and Wang (2002), we find that, for the market as a whole, significant informed trading or hedging frequently occur, and the opening minutes tend to be associated with a greater portion of trading motivated by hedging. More important to our purpose, for foreign institutions the absolute value of institutional order imbalance tends to be greater on days when the overall market’s informed trading is greater in the cases of regular contract on Taiwan composite index futures and electronic index futures, but for the dealer and domestic fund groups trading is not correlated with the overall market’s informed trading or hedging. An additional analysis of the relation between past institution trades and current returns provides some evidence implying institutions are informed, but the evidence can also be interpreted as their trades, which account for more than half of the overall trading, having an impact on subsequent trades.

L'objectif du principe de gouvernance d'entreprise de l'OCDE défini des recommandations en matière d'organisation et de transparence des entreprises afin d'obtenir le meilleur équilibre entre le surveillance, l'efficacité de la direction et la participation des parties prenantes. Aujourd'hui, ce principe est un ligne directrice essentielle pour gagner la confiance des investisseurs et constitue le standard minimum de la gestion des entreprises. L'efficacité de ce principe est non seulement dépend de la politique, l'économie et la connaissance des législation, mais aussi, dépend d'application des loi en Thaïlande, en France et en Chine. Notre étudie analyser les différences qui amènera pour créer une connaissance qui peut permettre l'adaptation d'un nouveau système de gestion d'entreprise afin d'améliorer le meilleur développement d'économique durable. / The principe of corporate governance of the OECD define recommendations for the organization and transparency of companies to obtain the best balance between the surveillance, the effective of leadership and the participation of stakeholder. Today, this principe is a guideline essential to gain the confidence of investors and its the minimum standard of corporate governance. However, the effectiveness of this principle depend on the politics, the economy and the legislation. And the varies according in Thailand, in France and in China. The study of these differences will lead then to create knowledge that may enable the adaptation of a new business management for better sustainable economy development in each country.