PurposeThe institutional framework of an African country may influence the effectiveness of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on foreign investment inflows. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the quality of a country's institutional framework impacts the effectiveness of IFRS to an adopting country and ultimately influences the levels of Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI).Design/methodology/approachEmploying country-level data. A sample of 15 countries from Africa is used. Data is collected over a period of 22 years (1994–2014). The authors employ the General Method of Moments (GMM) panel regression technique to examine whether the quality of a country's institutional framework has an impact on the relationship between IFRS and FPI and the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) technique to assess the level of impact.FindingsThe findings reveal that the quality of a country's institutional framework moderates the strength of the association between IFRS and FPI. Overall, the authors find that the quality of the institutional frameworks in African countries has a negative effect on the IFRS and FPI nexus.Research limitations/implicationsThe study focuses exclusively on African countries; using an exclusively African sample limits the generalisation of results to other continents like Latin America with similar environments to Africa.Practical implicationsThis study provide evidence that IFRS alone cannot ensure the intended capital market benefits but encourages the development of strong institutions in African countries to realise the most from IFRS adoption. The emphasis on institutional development is an essential contribution that this study makes.Originality/valueThis study is unique since it emphasises the importance of institutional framework quality when considering the impact of IFRS on foreign investment inflows in an African setting.

1Determining the residence of a taxpayer is one of the most important aspects of modern tax systems. For an individual taxpayer who migrates, a common trend in the modern world, the questions are where the person is ordinarily resident and whether the place of ordinary residence can change. The two key cases in South African jurisprudence that are cited whenever the question of residence or ordinary residence is raised are Cohen v CIR and CIR v Kuttel. These cases form the foundation of this article as they examine the meaning of “resident” and “ordinary” resident” in the modern milieu. The article provides the historical background to these two seminal cases, extracts the key principles handed down in each of the judgments and evaluates these principles against definitions of “resident” used in other countries with a view to evaluating whether the definition of “resident” for South African tax purposes, premised on the fundamental principles from these two historic cases, is still relevant and appropriate. The article queries whether the concept of “ordinary resident”, with its connotation of permanence, should be updated to reflect the modern reality of transience and mobility. The conclusion reached is that the existing definition of “resident” may be in need of updating to accommodate global trends and to bring the South African tax legislation more in line with modern developments and the introduction of an objective test could provide more certainty to both taxpayers and the fiscus, but this benefit should be weighed against the possible cost of a loss to the tax base.