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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of government expenditure on economic growth in 15 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries over the period of 2005–2017. More precisely, this paper investigates whether institutional environment influences the effect of government spending on economic growth.

This study adopts the generalized method of moments-system method of estimation to address the problem of dynamic endogeneity inherent in the relationship. Similarly, unlike previous studies which assume that the disturbances of a panel model are cross-sectionally independent, we account for cross-section dependency and cross-country heterogeneity inherent in empirical modeling using Driscoll and Kraay's nonparametric covariance matrix estimator, adjusted for use with both balanced and unbalanced panels along with Monte Carlo simulations.

The authors find that though, government spending has a positive impact on economic growth but the level of institutional quality adversely affect that positive impact. This suggests that the institutional environment in ECOWAS countries is a drag and not a push factor for government fiscal operations and/policies. Thus, the results provide empirical evidence that there is a conditional relationship between government spending and economic growth in African countries. That is, the effect of government spending on economic growth is dependent on the quality of institutions. Lastly, these findings suggest that in order for government spending to contribute to economic growth, African countries must develop a strong institutional environment.

Unlike previous time series studies for African countries which concentrated on the two variable case, we include institutional quality as a third variable to underline the potential importance of institutional quality for economic growth in ECOWAS countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direction of causality between government expenditure and economic growth in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries.

The study adopts the recently developed panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) by Love and Abrrigo (2015) and two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) in order to resolve the inherent problems of endogeneity and persistence in economic data.

The results from the study show no evidence of either unidirectional or bidirectional causal relationship between government expenditure and economic growth in ECOWAS member countries.

Unlike previous studies that adopted cointegration technique, we adopt a system GMM through the application of a dynamic PVAR framework within the framework of panel data analysis in order to address the possibility of feedback effect in the causal relationship between government expenditure and economic growth. In addition the PVAR also allows us to model shocks across countries.

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the adoption status of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) within Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states at the country level and highlight the main factors impeding the process of accounting harmonisation.

This study uses factor analysis (FA) to assess the status of IPSAS adoption as the weighted average of the adoption levels of three categories: central government, sub-national governments, and country-level consolidation. Based on this assessment, the sample is classified into three levels of IPSAS adoption: high, medium, and low.

The findings suggest a slow trend towards accounting harmonisation and an increasing influence of IPSAS. However, evidence also suggests significant limitations in the adoption of the standards, mainly attributed to national adaptations, which undermine the ongoing efforts for standardisation.

This study provides an integrated view of IPSAS adoption at the country level and sheds light on a different aspect of the international harmonisation process, which is missing from the literature.

This study aims to examine how 20 local governments in Canada and the USA operationalize the government–citizen trust relationship through the administration of social media by answering two questions: Can local governments use social media to increase citizen trust? and if local governments can use social media, what can be learned about the administration of social media that results in an increase in citizen trust of government?

Based on a normative belief that increasing the trustworthiness of government is a desired outcome, the working proposition is that social media may offer a low-barrier method for engaging citizens and supporting trust-based relationships, if social media programs are administered in a way that operationalizes this objective. Using content analysis of data collected from interview transcripts and documentary sources, this exploratory, process-oriented study emphasizes the social, organizational and functional contexts of social media and social media as records.

The study found that most cities had extensive programs featuring multiple accounts on a number of common platforms. The cities maintained tight control over content, account creation and employee and audience participation to ensure compliance with federal and provincial or state legislation and to mitigate technology and content-based risks. The cities used social media to broadcast information, respond to service requests and provide issue management. Social media results were measured sporadically on an ad hoc basis for operational purposes and only two cities had dedicated procedures in place for managing social media as records. Contrary to previous research, this study indicates that fiduciary trust relationships do require trust by the agent (i.e. institution) and the principal (i.e. citizen).

To increase generalizability, an effort was made to select cities that were demographically and geographically diverse by selecting a range of population sizes and locations. However, selection was skewed towards cities with well-developed social media programs, and as a result, over half of the cities were national, provincial or state capitals or larger population centres. While these cities experienced economic advantages, the participants in the study identified challenges around resourcing and capacity, and their responses are expected to be of value to cities operating under similar constraints. Additionally, this study represents a point in time, as social media use at the local governments continued to expand and evolve during and after the data collection period.

This paper identifies three scenarios where social media content from local government accounts should be managed as records, including: the documentation of incidents, the on-going collection of city content from high-profile accounts and the “on demand” collection of citizens’ content where cities have asked for citizen input on topics or issues.

This study provides an in-depth characterization of social media administration and use by 20 local governments in Canada and the USA. Considering the progress made by cities in e-government using their websites as a base, cities can develop greater capacity for open government, meaning wider participation by citizens in the decisions that affect them on a daily basis. To achieve goals of transparency, accountability and civic participation, cities will need to develop capacity around social media measurement, reporting and procedures for managing social media as records.

In providing a detailed and complete description of social media use in 20 cities in two countries, this study moves beyond a compliance- and requirement-driven approach to consider the larger question of government–citizen trust and the relevance of records within this relationship.

This study aims to provide insights into the possible impact of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) on public governance and perceived levels of corruption in developing countries.

Through a multivariate analysis on panel data applied to 36 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and sub-Saharan Africa over the period 2010–2020, the authors test the impact of IPSAS adoption on transparency, accountability and perceptions of less corruption. The authors examine the moderating role of transparency and accountability in the strength of the relationship between IPSAS and perceived corruption.

The main results show that IPSAS adoption promotes an increase in transparency and accountability and leads to the perception of less corruption. Additional tests show that transparency and accountability strengthen the effect of IPSAS adoption and experience on perceived corruption.

The first limitation may be the use of the Transparency International CPI to measure the level of perceived corruption. Probably, the CPI does not reflect the actual levels of corruption in countries while the literature argues that these two measures are related. Also, the lack of data on the status and level of adoption of IPSAS by governments may be one limitation of the sample.

The study may help public authorities in their decision to adopt IPSAS. In light of the findings, standard-setting bodies could be encouraged to strengthen the disclosure requirements of IPSAS that make governments more transparent and accountable to limit perceptions of corruption.

This study may also help citizens understand the benefits of such reforms in protecting public assets and how such standards may help improve social welfare.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies that examines the impact of IPSAS on good governance by combining the dimensions of transparency, accountability and perceptions of corruption in DCs. It also provides insights into the moderating role of public governance pillars. Finally, it includes the IPSAS experience of the country, which has been little tested previously.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the audit of outgoing leading officials' natural resource accountability and environmental governance, as well as the internal mechanism of audit of outgoing leading officials' natural resource accountability that plays a role in national environmental governance.

Based on city-level panel data from 2012 to 2015, this paper adopts a difference-in-difference model to examine the role of government audit in national governance from an environmental perspective. Furthermore, using a mediating effect model, the study sheds light on the internal mechanism of audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability that plays a role in national environmental governance.

This paper finds that: the implementation of the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability has significantly improved the water quality of the pilot area, but its effects on waste gas and smoke are not obvious; environmental supervision partly plays a mediating role in the improvement of regional environmental governance by the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability; the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability can complement the incentive mechanism of promotion. The older the local officials are, the more obvious the effect of the audit of outgoing leading officials’ natural resource accountability on the environmental quality of the pilot areas is.

This paper reveals the role of government audit from the perspective of environmental governance. It provides empirical evidence for policy regarding the audit of outgoing leading officials' natural resource accountability.

This paper investigates whether institutional environment influences the relationship government spending and economic growth in ECOWAS over the period 2008–2017.

The study adopts the recently developed panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) by Abrigo and Love (2015) and a two-step system generalised method of moment (GMM).

The results from the study show no evidence of either unidirectional or bidirectional causal relationship between government spending and economic growth in ECOWAS. Our findings reveal that government spending when associated with high level of corruption, oversized government and a waste of public resources will not cause economic growth.

Unlike previous studies, we resolve the inherent problems of endogeneity and persistence in economic data. Likewise, we depart from existing studies that examined the causal relationship in a bivariate framework and adopt a trivariate causality testing.

The present study investigates the role of fiscal illusion on income inequality in 46 selected countries in terms of income and development levels from 2002 to 2017.

The effect of fiscal illusion on income inequality is tested using the two-step system generalized method of moment (SYS-GMM) estimator.

The findings reveal the negative effect of fiscal illusion on income inequality, which means increasing fiscal illusion decreases income inequality in 46 selected countries. As in other countries, income inequality declines when fiscal illusion increases in high-income and developed countries, although the redistributive effect of fiscal illusion is more in high-income and developed countries than in other countries. In addition, the results demonstrate the positive effect of unemployment, urbanization and inflation as well as the negative effect of trade openness on income inequality in all three models.

Previous studies have examined the role of government in controlling income inequality from different perspectives; however, no study has detected the role of government in income distribution regarding fiscal illusion.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-05-2022-0311.

The aim of the study is to review the extant literature on International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) adoption in emerging economies (EEs) and low-income countries (LICs) (“what do we know?”), and to propose an agenda for future research (“what do we need to know?”).

An analytical framework that builds on diffusion theory is developed. The authors follow the “PRISMA Flow Diagram” to reduce a total of 427 articles from four databases to a final sample of 41 articles. These studies are examined, aided by the analytical framework.

The authors find that IPSASs are a relevant issue for EEs/LICs. Overall, existing research is often explorative. The authors discover that the majority of articles rely on secondary data collection. While two-thirds of the studies perform a content analysis of pre-existing material, about one-fifth of the articles each collect primary data through means of interviews and questionnaires. The findings offer a holistic understanding of where and at what stages IPSAS reforms stand in EEs/LICs, and what factors influence the progression of reforms to the next stage of diffusion.

The authors outline a number of avenues for further research after discussing the dominating trends and structuring the literature based on our analytical framework. These stem from looking at the blank spots and an identified need to contextualise IPSASs adoption in EEs/LICs.

This paper aims to research the reforms toward International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) implementation and the perceptions about the use and usefulness of accounting information in the context of local government in the Iberian Peninsula. The paper focuses on the perspective of chief financial officers (CFOs).

The paper uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Beyond the study of the context of the reform in both countries through the consultation of legislation and official documents, the authors collected primary data through a survey addressed to the local CFO to catch both countries' perceptions and beliefs toward the topic under research.

The authors' findings evidence that both countries have made strong efforts to adapt IPSAS to both countries' national standards. The coercive and mimetic isomorphism and the private accounting normative were important determinants in the reform. Looking at perceptions, budget information continues to be perceived as the king information for public management and decision-making. In a comparative way, the Portuguese CFO seems to be more optimistic concerning the use and usefulness of the new accounting system. The strong orientation of CFO to cash-basis and budgeting information is an important explanation of the lower use and usefulness, essentially in the Spanish context. The regression results show that individual perceptions and beliefs on the accounting reform influence the opinion about the usefulness and use of financial information.

The use of the survey method has some limitations very discussed in the literature that are also applied in this study.

The paper has the potential to contribute to the academic, political and practitioner discussion of the core purposes of financial accounting information in the public sector and financial accounting information's impacts on the European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS) framework.

The recent adoption of the new accounting system in local governments of both contexts contributes to knowledge on the public sector accounting reforms toward the transition to accrual accounting and the IPSAS. The innovative character of the paper contributes to better clarify how the perceptions of the accounting reform influence the usage level of public financial information.