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Financial inclusion and digital finance go side by side and help enhance agricultural activities; however, the magnitude of digital financial services varies across countries. In line with this argument, this study aims to examine whether financial inclusion enhances agricultural participation and decompose the significance of the difference in determinants of agricultural participation between financially included – not financially included households and digital finance – no digital finance households.

This study uses Pakistan’s household integrated economic survey 2018/19 to test hypotheses. The logit model is used to examine the effect of financial inclusion on agriculture participation. Moreover, this study employs a nonlinear Fairlie Oaxaca Blinder technique to investigate the difference in determinants of agricultural participation.

This study reports that financial inclusion positively influences agricultural participation, meaning households may have access to financial services and participate in agricultural activities. The results suggest that the likelihood of participating in agriculture in households with mobiles and smartphones is higher. Moreover, household size, income, age, gender, education, urban, remittances from abroad, fertilizer, pesticides, wheat, cotton, sugarcane, fruits and vegetables are the significant determinants of agricultural participation. To distinguish the financially included – not financially included households’ gap, this study employs a nonlinear Fairlie Oaxaca Blinder decomposition and finds that differences in fertilizer explain the substantial gap in agricultural participation. Likewise, this study tests the digital finance – no digital finance gap and finds that the difference in fertilizer is a significant contributor, describing a considerable gap in agricultural participation.

Empirically identified that various factors cause agricultural participation including financial inclusion and digital finance. Regarding the research limitation, this study only considers a developing country to analyze the findings. However, for future research, scholars may consider some other countries to compare the results and identify their differences.

The accessibility of fertilizer can reduce the agricultural participation gap. However, increased income level, education and cotton and sugar production can also overcome the differences in agriculture participation between digital finance and no digital finance households.

This is the first study to decompose the difference in determinants of agricultural participation between financially and not financially included households.

Even if digital financial services have a positive impact on financial inclusion, it creates a digital as well as gender divide within and across countries, creating regional disparity even within developing nations. Though pandemic has initiated digitalization of various services, there has been scanty research on whether digital transfer of income can improve digital financial inclusion in post-pandemic era, especially in developing countries. The purpose of the current study is to explain the regional disparity within developing countries from three regions East Asia Pacific, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, using latest World Findex data, 2021.

The author takes an instrumental variable approach to run bivariate probit model to find the factors that motivate the users to make digital payments.

The study observes that electronic transfer of wages, government transfers and remittances can motivate individuals to make use of digital mode of transactions and mobile. The practice of formal saving and borrowings are the prerequisites. However, this mechanism holds good for East Asia Pacific and not for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, which are poor in information and communication technology infrastructure. Women are lagging behind men, but digital transfer of wages motivate them to make digital transaction.

Digitalization of all government services and provision of affordable mobile network and internet services are necessary for regions like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. In East Asia Pacific region, data protection, data governance and better regulatory framework are required. Higher female labor force participation with digital transfer of wages and empowerment with smartphones are key to reducing the Gender gap.

The current study corrects for the possible endogeneity issue, which the extant literature has not paid attention to, and provides region-specific and gender-specific policy recommendations for an improved digital inclusion.

This study firstly aims to prepare a hierarchical structure of the barriers contributing to digital exclusion of women. Secondly, the study aims to understand the inter-relationship of the barriers by converting them into a cyclic flow.

Systematic review was conducted through Web of Science and EBSCO Host Discovery Services with keywords: “digital divide” OR “digital gap” OR “digital inequality” OR “online difference” AND gender AND wom?n AND factors OR “demographic factors” OR “socio-economic” OR determinants OR reasons OR causes OR influences. Review was conducted of articles published in English language after 2012. Systematic literature review was conducted in line with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Framework 2020. Authors reviewed 21 reports.

This research found absence of education as the root of digital exclusion of women in the hierarchy of barriers. The cyclic flow of barriers displayed that how ill education of women lead to financial and psychological dependence of women on men, creating a hurdle in women empowerment. To break the cycle of digital exclusion, women education is must not only on primary basis but their tertiary education is important too.

This study makes an important contribution by ranking those barriers in a pyramid hierarchy and depicting their inter relation by framing a cyclic structure. This study provides suggestions to remove those barriers and ultimately break their chain to provide digital inclusive society for women.

This study aims to explore the opinions of Built Environment Professionals (BEP) on the usage of fourth-generation digital technologies in the construction industry.

This study adopts a qualitative research approach and conducts semi-structured interviews with Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) professionals to explore the adoption and utilisation of fourth-generation digital technologies in the construction industry. The semi-structured interviews allowed the participants to elaborate on their experiences, and thematic analysis was employed to identify and analyse significant themes related to the topic.

Accounts from BAME construction professionals reveal that the increased popularity of fourth-generation digital technologies, also known as Industry 4.0 technologies, does not necessarily result in increased usage. This is because many of these new technologies have not been embraced and are unpopular in certain circles. A more significant revelation is the impact of BAME community settings on determining the career pathways of most individuals, which often do not support the construction or digital technology pathways within the construction industry.

Research targeting ethnic minorities may not necessarily yield a large response due to the sensitivity of the issues raised. However, conducting a nationwide research with a larger sample size drawn from various locations in the UK could achieve more robust findings and uncover additional issues. Meanwhile, the results of this research can serve as a framework for more extensive investigations.

The research offers valuable recommendations to industry and academia regarding the need to address the specific challenges faced by the BAME community in terms of digital technology adoption. These issues are often overlooked in most discussions about digital technology.

The study provides critical recommendations that are relevant to Further and Higher Education (HE) institutions, industries, construction organisations, government bodies, etc. Recommendations include a call for collaboration between educational institutions, industry partners and local communities to facilitate awareness and orientation programmes within the community.

The digital economy has become a key force supporting the high-quality development of tourism. This paper discusses the coupling coordination relationship and spatiotemporal evolution path of digital economy and tourism in China's provinces.

This paper uses the entropy method to measure the development level of digital economy and tourism, and establishes coupling coordination model and spatial autocorrelation model to study the interaction between the two industries.

Results show that the development levels of the two industries are rising, which spatially show a progressively decreasing pattern of east-middle-northeast-west. The coupling coordination degrees of the two industries have increased steadily, but the overall level is still near maladjusted. Spatially, the positive correlation is increasing, but the incongruity of spatial agglomeration is still significant. The coupling coordination evolution path in the provinces shows differentiated characteristics. The migration path is mainly concentrated in Zones I and II. The eastern region has an obvious trend of extending to Zone III, where the tourism industry was the most affected by the pandemic.

The study helps clarify the industrial coupling and coordination relationship in various regions and formulate regional tourism digital transformation strategies to promote the high-quality development of China's tourism industry.

This paper enriches the research on the relationship between digital economy and tourism from the perspective of industrial integration. The development commonality of China's tourism digital transformation summarized provides theoretical reference and demonstration for the coordinated development of China's tourism.

In today’s information and knowledge society, it is indispensable for citizens to acquire the requisite digital and information literacy (IL) skills to search information independently to meet their multiple and diverse information needs. As a result of digitalisation in the world, development and acquisition of digital and information skills is critical even for students and learners to retrieve digitised and online information to meet or achieve their curriculum-related accomplishments. The purpose of this study is to investigate the status of the digital and information literacies in South Africa from 2016 to 2022.

This qualitative study used a scoping review approach to collect data from research articles, conference articles and textbooks on digital literacy and IL – published in the years ranging between 2016 and 2022 from Google Scholar.

The major findings revealed that majority of the citizens especially students and learners lack digital and IL skills to recognise when information is needed, to find, locate, evaluate and use the retrieved information to meet an information need in a particular situation or context. Practical implications of this study include the alignment of curricula towards information and communication technologies to face the everchanging digital information technologies.

The study used scoping literature review research where empirical studies were retrieved and selected to address the objectives. This study provided significant approaches regarding promoting information and digital literacies in developing countries such as South Africa.

This study aims to investigate the connection between digital literacy and women’s empowerment in the rural Himachal Pradesh. It explores how improved digital skills contribute to increased empowerment among women with a specific focus on the role of education in enhancing digital literacy.

This study included 250 rural participants who completed structured questionnaires. Analytical tools, including independent-sample t-tests and partial least squares structural equation modeling, were applied to the data to gain insights into the relationship between digital literacy and women’s empowerment.

This study revealed a significant positive link between digital literacy and women’s empowerment in the rural Himachal Pradesh context. Education has emerged as a key factor that influences women’s digital skills and empowerment levels.

This research adds novelty by examining the digital literacy–women’s empowerment nexus in rural Himachal Pradesh and emphasizing the impact of education. The combination of statistical methods offers a robust approach to understanding this relationship and underscores the importance of digital inclusion and education for gender equality and women’s progress.

Information technology (IT) personnels’ technical, business and behavioral skills are critical enablers for generating IT value. In an increasingly digitalized working environment where non-IT employees participate in digital innovations, a focus on IT personnels’ skills only doesn’t meet researchers’ need for a framework to study digital skills and managers’ need to address digital skills challenges across an enterprise’s workforce. Nevertheless, the digital skills topic is complicated by conceptual ambiguity and a lack of theoretically derived and empirically validated model. The purpose of this study is to address this problem.

Theoretically, this study draws on human capital (HC) and resource-based view (RBV) theories. Empirically, it follows mixed method combining interviews and a survey.

The digital skills construct is a multidimensional second order reflective construct. While its development is influenced by an organization’s commitment and exposure to digitalization, it influences the value organizations obtain from digitalization.

This study conceptualizes the digital skills construct, identifying technology agnostic subdimensions that are meaningful beyond a particular digital domain [information and communication technology (ICT), information, Internet, Inter of Things (IoT)] and establishing a valid measure. Other researchers can improve both the indicators of the existing four conceptually distinct and managerially recognizable workplace digital skills dimensions as well as testing new ones.

Managers can use the instrument to assess the extent to which their non-IT workforces are equipped with digital skills and get strategic insights for specific interventions such as upskilling or buying in skills.

The main theoretical contribution of the paper is the conceptualization and validation of the digital skills construct for the non-IT workforce. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical framework to explain the factors that could influence the development of digital skills and demonstrate the impact that digital skills have on selected digitalization value indicators. This contribution provides the foundation for investigating the drivers, outcomes and the relationship of digital skills to other constructs such as digital transformation, innovation and firm performance.

This research aims to discover the relationship between social media usage (SMU) and the critical thinking ability (CTA) of university students, and to answer the question that whether social media dependence (SMD) affects the development of CTA, and thus providing a reference for the social media access strategy of academic libraries from the perspective of media information literacy.

The research data were collected via 300 valid questionnaires whose respondents are students from three universities in China. Multistage stratified cluster sampling method was used to select the respondents, which guarantees statistical representativeness. A pre-test was conducted to ensure the validity of the questionnaire.

It is shown that the total score of CTA and the six sub-dimensions are significantly positively correlated with SMU, but strongly negatively correlated with SMD. Based on the mediating effect testing, it is discovered that the degree of SMD can affect the promoting relations between the usage intensity of social media (UISM) and CTA. Clearly, SMU is a double-edged sword. While it narrows the digital gap in terms of accessibility, it widens the digital gap in terms of usage.

The differences in SMU have a significant impact on the development of CTA of university students. This inspires us to consider the ability of “using social media in a balanced way” as an important evaluation and training direction when inquiring media literacy. As social media is becoming a critical channel in cultivating individual's thinking skills, it is highly suggested that the amount of time spent on reading fragmented information on the internet should be controlled.

The study aimed to assess the digital literacy skills of the students of Sacred Heart College, Chalakudy, to know whether they possess the digital literacy skills to perform well in the digital environment. The study also analyzed how digital literacy skills were affected by various factors.

The study used stratified random sampling technique, and data were collected through a self-assessment survey using an online questionnaire designed based on DigComp 2.1: The Digital Competence Framework by the European Commission.

The results indicated that the college students needed training on digital literacy skills, as the majority students had only moderate to low digital literacy skills. It was proven that exposure to technology and the Internet will not necessarily yield skills to perform well in the digital environment. Also, digital literacy skills were not affected by various factors like age, level of study, etc.

The study helped to identify the digital literacy deficiencies in the students of Sacred Heart College, and it can serve as a valuable model for conducting similar investigations in diverse educational institutions. Conducting such studies offers institutions valuable insights, enabling them to create and implement personalized digital literacy training programs that can enhance students' abilities to navigate the digital landscape with proficiency and effectiveness. The study results can be insightful for educators, policymakers and the Kerala Government to reassess the current approaches and design an effective curriculum for integrating technology in education.

Although there are several studies that evaluated college students’ digital literacy in India and other countries, there are very few studies in the context of Kerala. Therefore, this study is distinctive and will serve as an example for all such studies in the future.