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A popular convention in the political-economy literature is that causality runs from democracy to economic growth. That thinking has continued to evoke significant debates among scholars. This study aims to propose a new research experiment by investigating whether macroeconomic variables cause democratisation.

The study uses a panel data set of 48 carefully selected economies in Sub-Saharan Africa spanning 1991 to 2020 and uses the PVAR system generalised method of moment (GMM) approach.

With the application of three macroeconomic indicators: economic growth, full employment and balance of payment equilibrium, the study suggests that economic growth has a negative implication on the democratisation process and that the incentives that increase national income provide in the global South enable autocratic rulers to impede democratic growth. The Granger causality test demonstrates a unidirectional effect from economic growth to democracy. The eigenvalue stability condition, impulse response function and forecast-error variance decomposition all confirmed the validity of the findings with the PVAR system GMM. Finally, the study proposed policy and theoretical implications for the political stakeholders.

Robust development of economic institutions (particularly the anti-corruption and rule of law) in the global South is required to tame the potential for the state actors to turn public resources into personal use to further their parochial political interest in the form of perpetuating themselves in office which negates the ideals of democracy and social norms. Strong institutions could prevent the misuse of national income and enhance a good quality of life for the citizenry, making them grow confidence in the democratisation process.

The research paper makes an insightful contributions from the methodological perspective and the sampling perspective. The author uses a new research method, the PVAR system GMM becoming the first attempt of such a method to be applied in determining the causal effects of macroeconomic variables on democracy in the literature. Another relevant contribution of the study relates to the sample technique of selecting economies from the Sub-Saharan Africa with notable weak or slow democratisation process.

In this chapter, we draw on trans-informed theoretical frameworks to provide insights into gender justice and gender democratization in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Our purpose is to illuminate the systemic impact of cisgenderist and cissexist beliefs which refer to the legitimation of birth-assigned gender identity and what this means for embracing a critical project of gender expansiveness in the ECEC classroom. More broadly, we explicate how our engagement with trans studies informs a critique of existing debates about masculinities, boys and male teachers in the early years. We draw on the work of trans scholars in the first part of this chapter to ground an epistemological basis for our understanding of gender expansiveness and masculinities that challenges a cisnormative framing of gender justice in ECEC. In the second part, we draw specifically on scholars in the field who have been pivotal in elaborating what we understand to be gender expansive identities and what this means for thinking about gender justice in the early childhood classroom. In the third part, we reflect on the pedagogical implications of boyhood sissiness through a trans-informed lens and explicate its implications for understanding boys and masculinities in the early years. Finally, we draw on transgender studies-informed perspectives on masculinity which call for ‘de-essentializ[ing] masculinity as grounded in a cis-male body’ (Gottzén & Straube, 2016, p. 217) and explore their implications for re-envisioning masculinities as a gender-transformative project in ECEC.

This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of open-access publications by Indian non-profit organizations over the past two decades. The study explores the growth, licensing patterns, citations, authorship patterns and other parameters to understand the scholarly output.

The study involves data collection from OpenAlex scholarly catalog. Data analysis uses OpenRefine, a data carpentry tool, to examine and extract various aspects of scholarly output. A total of 89,149 scholarly outputs from 2004 to 2023 were analyzed using statistical and bibliometric methods.

The findings revealed a positive publication growth trend, with 57.74% open access. Gold OA dominates, with 69.61% of papers in 2023. Licensing patterns reveal that 63.75% of OA papers have licenses. Most papers have multiple authors, with 24.83% of over ten authors receiving 60.12% of citations. “Medknow” is the leading publisher, and “The Indian Journal of Ophthalmology” tops journals. Contributions from repositories like SSRN and PubMed are significant. The study also examines citation patterns across different OA types and identifies the top 30 research areas, emphasizing “Medicine” as the most prevalent.

The identified trends and patterns offer valuable insights for policymakers, researchers and organizations to enhance accessibility and impact. This study stresses sustained efforts for transparency and democratization of knowledge in the non-profit sector.

This study filled a gap in existing research by focusing on Indian non-profits, highlighting their roles and impacts often overlooked in scholarly literature. This study provides insights into the growth of open-access publications and their implications in the non-profit sector.

The research aims to identify the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site (WHS) managers' perception of cultural sustainability concepts and elements in tourism.

A literature review was carried out to identify the main speeches and characteristic elements of cultural sustainability present in the academic field, and then a quantitative survey was carried out with 60 managers of UNESCO WHSs to evaluate their perception of the theme.

The results show that managers believe that the concept of cultural sustainability is much more closely linked to the social dimension of sustainability than to the economic and environmental dimensions. Thus, elements such as the preservation of tangible and intangible assets, the participation of society in the management of heritage, the democratization of access, the guarantee of the appreciation of culture and its preservation for future generations are basic elements for cultural sustainability. Finally, although they believe that understanding the concept of cultural sustainability is fundamental to their activities, they still lack knowledge of how to measure cultural sustainability in their spaces.

Although the theme of sustainability has several published studies, most of the work focuses only on studies of its social, economic and environmental dimensions. The debates on the role of culture in sustainability are still incipient, and understanding the managers' perception of the topic enables the creation of more effective strategies that guarantee cultural sustainability in heritage by tourism.

In recent years, new and technologically innovative financial products and services, generally subsumed under the fintech umbrella, have permeated all areas of capital markets at an exponential rate. Primarily driven by developments in Web3 and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), fintech solutions offer valuable benefits to all existing markets and participants and are the basis for introducing wholly new segments to classic capital market ecosystems. However, this increasing fintech adaptation does not come without challenges. Due to the technologies' nascent nature and often unregulated status, many products are susceptible to manipulation and fraud. The result can be sizable investor losses and excessive regulatory and public scrutiny. This chapter highlights the most essential and prominent fintech solutions used in capital markets today, along with their features, value additiveness, and degree of adaptation.

The sporting body in Indian sports studies has been studied in the context of changing power relations in society, and this essay continues in a similar vein. The significance of sport in India evolved from being used as a means of control by the coloniser to becoming a point of resistance and then a tool for nation-building for the colonised peoples. Post-liberalisation wrought significant changes to the social and cultural landscape and brought with it a singular focus upon the individual, as the idea of the nation receded to the background and the link between sport and self-making became prominent. In the context of the changing cultures of sport and the body from colonial to post-liberalisation India and the growing prominence of sport in popular culture, this chapter turns a critical eye towards the representation of sport in three Nike advertisements between 2007 and 2016 with the understanding that these representations are shaped by the workings of power and ideology in society and therefore provide a window to access the evolution of sports discourse over time. Through this examination, it explores the complex dynamic between the liberation of the postcolonial sporting body from discursive shackles and its evolution – and possible entrapment – into becoming a placard of the neoliberal vision and what this means in terms of the decoloniality discourse.

The objective of this study is to examine developments in the discursive practice of non-financial reporting in the public healthcare sector. In doing so, the authors investigate how the main reform foci of productivity and quality are represented, with a specific focus on the patient.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), the authors conduct a longitudinal study (2007–2018) of healthcare reporting foci across the five administrative regions responsible for public hospitals in Denmark. The study analyses sixty annual reports and draws on contemporary reform documents over this period. CDA enables a micro-textual analysis, combined with macro-insights and discussions on social practice.

The findings show complex webs of presentation strategies, but in particular two changes occur during the period. First, the patient is centred throughout but the framing changes from productivity and waiting lists to quality and dialogue. Second, in the first years, the regions present themselves as actively highlighting financial and quality concerns, which changes to a passive and indirect form of presentation steered by indicators and patient legislation enforced by central government. This enhances passivity and distance in healthcare regional non-financial reporting where the regions seek to conform to such demands. Simultaneously, however, the authors find a tendency to highlight very different local initiatives, which shows an attempt to go beyond a pure automatic mode of reporting found in earlier studies.

Responding to the literature on both healthcare and financial reporting, this study identifies novel links between micro-level texts and macro-level social practices, enabling insights into the potentially intertwined impacts of public-sector reporting. The authors offer insights into the complexity of the construction of non-financial reporting in the public sector, which has a wider impact and different intentions than private-sector reporting.

This paper answers the question of whether climate-related financial policies (CRFP) enable the energy transition in the European region.

By using various econometric techniques (namely a panel-corrected standard errors [PCSE] model and a feasible generalized least square estimates [FGLS] model, this study examines a link between CRFP and energy security (ES).

Using seven indicators, this paper examines four parts of energy security: acceptability, availability, sustainability and developability. The author has performed econometric analyses on 17 European countries during the period 2010–2020 to reveal critical findings. The results show a relationship between CRFP and energy intensity, energy consumption, nonfossil energy consumption, renewable energy consumption and CO₂ emissions. This finding suggests that CRFP involvement benefits the energy system’s acceptability, developability and sustainability. Moreover, the author observes long-term cointegration between CRFP and ES, and the findings validate their short-term and long-term effects. The author also finds that ES is influenced by past and future CRFP participation.

This study focuses on countries in a European Union (EU) region, which contribute significantly to secure ES and represent a varied spectrum of rich and emerging economies.

In this paper, the author contributes to the research in three ways. First, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study to explore CRFP as a contributor to the security of the energy system. This research contributes to the existing body of information by investigating the influence of CRFP on environmental quality as assessed by various dimensions. Second, this paper uses a PCSE model based on cross-sectional dependence and stationarity tests. Furthermore, the findings can be further verified using FGLSs considering heteroscedasticity. Long-term and short-term impacts of autoregressive distributed lag methods were also investigated using pooled mean groups (PMG).