Risk Governance and Control journal, volume 6, issue 1, 2016: Editorial

The recent issue of the journal Risk Governance and Control: Financial Markets and Institutions pays attention to problems of debt management, credit ranking and insurance etc. More detailed issues are given below.

Asri Marsidi, Hairul Azlan Annuar, Abdul Rahim Abdul Rahman propose the development of an index of Islamic Financial and Social Reporting (IFSR) for Islamic banks. The index of IFSR is carefully developed based on the relevant and applicable standards, guidelines and literature from an Islamic perspective such as the Malaysian Accounting Standards Board (MASB), Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and Islamic social reporting literature.

Sandra Jooste, Sanlie Middelberg, Merwe Oberholzer comprised annual analyses for 12 companies listed under the Platinum and Precious Metals sector on the JSE Ltd for the 14-year period 2000 to 2013. The results of the study were inconclusive as a statistically significant positive correlation between changes in debt levels and changes in TSR could only be found in two of these years.

Virimai Mugobo, Misheck Mutize show that there is a statistically significant relationship between FDI and SCR downgrades. Evidence also shows that not all downgrades from the three CRAs equally affect investors’ decisions as Moody’s downgrades tend to dominate, causing FDI to reaction at with a higher magnitude. However, not only SCR downgrade determines FDI flow into SA but there is a host of other fundamentals that government should address to attract investment and stabilise financial markets.

L Maseko, B Marx found that though King III principles and practices may be interpreted as vague with regard to how to implement IT governance principles, COBIT 5 succeeds in bridging the gap between control requirements, technical issues, information systems and business risk, which consequently results in a better facilitation of IT governance.

C L R Fernhout, F J Mostert, J H Mostert address the perceptions of reinsurers regarding their reinsurance activities, where the reinsurer sells reinsurance to other insurance entities (viz. insurers and reinsurers), as well as buys reinsurance from other insurance entities. They focus on the improvement of financial decision-making regarding the reinsurance operations of the reinsurers. To achieve this objective a literature study was undertaken to provide adequate background to compile a questionnaire for the empirical survey.

Vaneshree Govender, Renitha Rampersad are concerned with the process of change in the Higher Education context and examines a South African case study. The study was conducted within a quantitative paradigm and the sample population was 400 administrative and academic staff from across the seven campuses. In order to satisfy the research objectives of the study, a self-administered location based survey was distributed and data was analyzed using SPSS. The authors revealed that living and coping with change in the work environment is a fact of life for organisations and individuals.

Guray Kucukkocaoglu, M. Ayhan Altintas intend to develop an econometric credit risk model to estimate credit loss distributions of Turkish Banking System under baseline and stress macro scenarios, by substituting default rates with non-performing loan (NPL) ratios.

Katleho Daniel Makatjane and Ntebogang Dinah Moroke develop both Seasonal ARIMA and Holt-Winters models to predict the monthly car sales in South Africa using data for the period of January 1994 to December 2013.

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We hope that you will enjoy reading the journal and in future we will receive new papers that cover the most important issues and best practices of corporate governance, risk management and finance!