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With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

This study develops a structural model to examine the relationships among subjective perception of health, subjective perception of economic and social support, the perceived freedom in leisure, leisure satisfaction, and the well-being of elders. The subject of this study is the elderly who participated in leisure activities at Evergreen Academy in Kaohsiung City. Convenience sampling and quota sampling are adopted. 1,200 self-administered questionnaires are distributed, and 535 are valid, with a response rate of 45%. The results of this study show that subjective perception of health will positively affect perceived freedom in leisure; subjective perception of economics will positively affect perceived freedom in leisure and well-being; social support will positively affect perceived freedom in leisure, leisure satisfaction, and well-being; perceived freedom in leisure will positively affect leisure satisfaction and well-being; leisure satisfaction will positively affect well-being. There are significant differences in the subjective perception of economic and social support between male and female elders. There are significant differences in the subjective perception of economic, leisure satisfaction, and well-being among those with different education levels.

This paper focuses on governance in higher education in China. It sees that governance as distinctive on the world scale and the potential source of distinctiveness in other domains of higher education. By taking an historical approach, reviewing relevant literature and drawing on empirical research on governance at one leading research university, the paper discusses system organisation, government–university relations and the role of the Communist Party (CCP), centralisation and devolution, institutional leadership, interior governance, academic freedom and responsibility, and the relevance of collegial norms. It concludes that the party-state and Chinese higher education will need to find a Way in governance that leads into a fuller space for plural knowledges, ideas and approaches. This would advance both indigenous and global knowledge, so helping global society to also find its Way.

This paper aims to analyze the potential variables explaining the compliance value added tax (VAT) gap, which basically represents an estimate of the unpaid VAT in the economy. A major component of compliance VAT Gap is represented by tax fraud; there exist other causes too, like insolvencies, bankruptcies, optimizations practices and maladministration. The objective of our paper is to revisit the main determinants of the VAT compliance gap for the European Union (EU)-27 member states. Using econometric modeling, our study identifies the relationship between the VAT gap and various determinants of it.

Our work focuses on the shadow economy, final consumption, VAT revenues, standard VAT rates, differences between the standard and reduced rates, economic prosperity, press freedom, political stability and others, as determinants of European VAT compliance gaps, for the 2005–2020 time interval. The methods include panel data analysis through simple and multiple regression modeling, the combinatorial approach, fixed and random effects.

Our study validates the direct impact of shadow economy and the indirect impact of VAT revenues, economic prosperity and press freedom, upon VAT compliance gaps. Upon subsampling of EU member states within old and new ones, our results estimate a larger positive impact of shadow economy upon old member states, compared to new ones.

The policy implications include leverage effects of governments acting upon a reduction in shadow economy phenomena and boosts of economic development, political stability and press freedom, in order to attain the contraction of compliance VAT gaps.

Our paper sheds light in a poorly explored scientific area, that of the determinants of VAT gap, especially in relationship with financial and economic crime phenomena.

The media is described as a fourth estate of the realm due to its ability to frame and shape discussions on governance and provide a stimulus for fighting corruption. But is the media really an effective tool for fighting corruption? This question arises due to the possibility of the media being used for propaganda, biased reporting and media owners’ and journalists’ engagement in corruption. The current study addresses the question by exploring the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of Ghanaian justice and anti-corruption officials.

The study adopts a qualitative approach by interviewing justice and anti-corruption officials across three administrative regions in Ghana.

The results show that while justice officials describe the media as a medium for accusing officials unjustifiably and exaggerating the scale of corruption, anti-corruption officials believe the media helps to fight corruption. In addition to uncovering and exposing public officials’ corruption, the media is also a double-edged sword characterised by intra-vigilance: the media hold “their own” (i.e. journalists fighting corruption) accountable through criticism and exposure of wrongdoings.

The double-edged nature of the media can strengthen and enhance the fight against corruption because anti-corruption actors and journalists will be cautious as misjudgements or errors committed will not be overlooked or concealed by the media. Therefore, anti-corruption agencies in Ghana can collaborate with the media to uncover and expose corruption committed by public officials and even journalists or media owners.

This study is the first in Ghana to explore the relationship between the media and corruption from the perspectives of justice and anti-corruption officials. The approach, frameworks and methodology adopted in this study can be applied in similar studies in other countries on the African continent and beyond.