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The unprecedented SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has further constrained the budgets of governments worldwide for delivering their much-needed infrastructure. Consequently, public-private partnerships (PPPs), with the private sector's investment and ingenuity, would appear to be an increasingly popular alternative. Value for money (VfM) has become the major criterion for evaluating PPPs against the traditional public sector procurement and, however, is plagued with controversy. Hence, it is important that governments compare and contrast their practice with similar and disparate bodies to engender best practice. This paper, therefore, aims to understand governments' assessment context and provide a cross-continental comparison of their VfM assessment.

Faced with different domestic contexts (e.g. aging infrastructure, population growth, and competing demands on finance), governments tend to place different emphases when undertaking the VfM assessment. In line with the theory of boundary spanning, a cross-continental comparison is conducted between three of the most noticeable PPP markets (i.e. the United Kingdom, Australia and China) about their VfM assessment. The institutional level is interpreted by a social, economic and political framework, and the methodological level is elucidated through a qualitative and quantitative VfM assessment.

There are individual institutional characteristics that have shaped the way each country assesses VfM. For the methodological level, we identify that: (1) these global markets use a public sector comparator as the benchmark in VfM assessment; (2) ambiguous qualitative assessment is conducted only against PPPs to strengthen their policy development; (3) Australia's priority is in service provision whereas that of the UK and China is project finance and production; and (4) all markets are seeking an amelioration of existing controversial VfM assessments so that purported VfM relates to project lifecycles. As such, an option framework is proposed to make headway towards a sensible selection of infrastructure procurement approaches in the post COVID-19 era.

This study addresses a current void of enhancing the decision-making process for using PPPs within today's changing environment and then opens up an avenue for future empirical research to examine the option framework and ensuing VfM decisions. Practically, it presents a holistic VfM landscape for public sector procurers that aim to engage with PPPs for their infrastructure interventions.

Public sector auditing research has changed rapidly over the past four decades. This paper aims to reveal how the field has developed and identify avenues for future research.

The authors used a structured literature review following Massaro et al. The sample comprises papers on public sector auditing published in accounting and public sector management journals between 1991 and 2020.

The present analysis highlights that academic research interest in public sector auditing has grown and become more diverse. The authors argue this may reflect a transformation of the public sector in recent decades, owing to the developing institutional logics of public sector reforms, from traditional public administration to new public management and now new public governance.

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the public sector auditing literature, discussing different perspectives over time. It also outlines the various public sector reforms introduced over the period of the study. In reviewing the existing literature, the authors highlight the themes for future research and policy settings.

This study aims to highlight the importance of intellectual capital (IC) for the operation of waqf (Islamic endowment) institutions, as few studies have discussed this issue in relation to non-profit religious organisations, particularly waqf organisations. Consequently, this study hopes to contribute to the development of waqf institutions in terms of human capital proficiency, the efficiency of operations and the effectiveness and sustainability of performance.

The authors reviewed a significant body of relevant studies written on various aspects of IC, to highlight the significance of considering IC in the operation of non-profit organisations (NPOs) and waqf institutions.

This study highlights the importance of IC in the operation of waqf institutions. It provides a platform that facilitates understanding of the existing obstacles and challenges in waqf institutions (such as lack of accountability, lack of funding, mismanagement and lack of trained labour, among others) and offers potential solutions through the consideration of knowledge and IC.

This study is a conceptual analysis of IC in the context of NPOs. Future studies should conduct empirical testing, which will provide more detailed discussion and enriching insights into the issue of IC and the performance of NPOs, particularly in the case of waqf institutions.

This study provides several important implications for waqf institutions and other NPOs, as it sheds light on the consideration of knowledge and IC in their operations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to discuss the issues of waqf in the light of IC and provide an integrated framework for the operation of waqf institutions.

Hierarchically superior bodies develop normative instructions to induce the diffusion of innovations, stimulating the adoption of management practices in supervised public bodies and seeking public administration efficiency increase. Despite this, the effectiveness of these normative instructions is unknown, as well as its inducing and lasting effects in the diffusion of these innovations, especially in Brazil. This study aims to understand the effects of normative induction.

The adoption of risk management, integrity & ethics and information security practices was evaluated over a decade (2009 to 2019), including the adoption behavior of more than 200 Brazilian federal agencies. Public open data were collected and analyzed with multinomial logistic regression.

The normative instructions’ effectiveness in propagating the evaluated practices is remarkable; however, its mere development by the superior bodies cannot be considered enough since the general adoption index can be considered good but not excellent. No evaluated practice reached a saturation level above 75%.

This paper contributes to bringing the international literature’s generic knowledge on the adoption of innovation to the specific Brazilian public administration context, providing insightful implications for policymakers, public managers and researchers.

This work is unique, as it systematically analyzes multiple innovation adoption and presents excellent opportunities for future researchers by reproducing all scripts and automation developed. Furthermore, all data are available and hosted on public platforms with detailed steps and documentation.

The use of open data from governmental sources allows enhanced transparency and the discovery of affecting variables while observing innovation adoption in the public administration.

The presence of normative instructions and their adoption rate is rarely measured in the Brazilian public administration.

This paper addresses the use of the electronic survey method with particular reference to management accounting research.

A total of 222 questionnaires were used, where 182 questionnaires were sent with an accompanying invitation letter to participate in a pre‐paid envelope. There were posted directly to the respondents. The remainder were administered as an email survey.

The results of the email survey have been compared with that of the traditional postal survey and the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two methods are discussed and explored. The findings show that email and Internet facilitated surveys can yield higher returns at a lower cost per returned questionnaire. Moreover, such surveys are also a relatively inexpensive and expedient means of communicating with respondents, while facilitating a convenient way of correcting misunderstandings and following up on missing data.

Drawing on the literature, strategies such as email surveys and other Web‐based activities will enrich the data and increase response rates. The value of the paper is to draw attention to such methods, which will help overcome problem of low response rates associated with traditional postal surveys.