Stephanie Lim

This essay discusses how many leadership teams are seeing the importance of identifying and managing Environmental, Social and Governance ("ESG") impacts and risks within their organisations. The boards have oversight of risks and are responsible to steward and influence their management and lead their organisations' ESG efforts. They are ultimately responsible for their organisations' business performance and long-term enterprise value.

This essay aims to examine corporate governance in Mexico. This country was chosen for this discussion as it is particularly intriguing to find out how one of the largest economies in Latin America was driven to foster corporate governance in their capital markets. We will first start with a brief historical background of the roles that capital markets play in regulating and safeguarding the interest of market players. The discussion will revolve around governance structures, the banking and financial systems, ownership and control patterns, policies and regulations at both market and company levels of corporate governance. It also examines how government policies and legal framework maintain the soundness of capital markets.

This paper discusses that financial liberalization had proven to strengthen Mexico’s financial and economic development and could contribute to higher GDP growth. But it is worth highlighting that, the causality outcome between financial liberalization and economic development is often mixed. Financial liberalization can be proven to be effective for short and long-run growth only when there are gradual increased in financial and trade openness, well-established institutional framework, prudential supervision in the credit market and well-regulated capital control mechanism.

Microfinance institutions were established in the developing world only during the recent past few decades. It deviates away from a traditional banking system to serve the local poor communities. Microfinance institutions have proven the possibility of providing reliable banking services to the poor who otherwise have no access to financial services without good credentials and collaterals. This paper examines the financial performance of Teba, Centenary and FECECAM microfinance banks in Africa with respect to their profitability, asset-liability management, portfolio quality and efficiency. The study sheds some light to the patterns of profitability, portfolio management and efficiency and that the larger the economies of scale of institutions, the better their financial performance are. It also reveals that assessment of financial performance based on ratio analysis has its limitations.

Private equity investments in South Africa have witnessed positive trajectory over the past two decades. There is general perception that investments can be beneficial to the developing countries because of its effects on resources mobilization and allocation. As revealed from the analysis result, the short and long-run effects of private equity investments on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), real exchange rate, ratio of trade to GDP indicate that they are positively related and negatively related with real interest rate and rate of inflation. Whilst, private equity investments appear to be negatively related to
labour force and domestic credit to private sector in the short-run and positively related in the long-run. The overall empirical evidence indicates that private equity investments have limited impact to the overall economic growth in South Africa and the analysis on the relationships between private equity investments and the selected macroeconomic variables yields mixed results.