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The paper aims to examine the state of electronic service delivery in Bangladesh. It reviews the structure and operation of the “e-service” centers at the district, sub-district (upazila), and union levels by taking an inventory and assessing their contributions.

The paper is based on a review of the functions and operations of the service delivery agencies with reference to the claims made by the government. It is based on secondary materials obtained from academic studies, government documents, relevant websites, and media reports.

Electronic delivery of public services in Bangladesh has not been effective as planned. There are issues regarding channels of communication, the competence of public officials, human and financial resources, and political will to support the agencies delivering public services.

The paper examines the arrangements, practices, and problems of delivery of public services in Bangladesh through e-service centers at the local levels to determine the progress and potentials of employing digital technology for addressing problems. It proposes the strategy for public service delivery by using digital technology in the country.

The construction industry is widely recognized as one of the most hazardous sectors in the world. Despite extensive research on safety management, a critical issue remains that insufficient attention is devoted to safety practices in rural areas. Notably, accidents frequently occur during the construction of rural self-built houses (RSH) in China. Safety management tends to be overlooked due to the perceived simplicity of the construction process. Furthermore, it is essential to acknowledge that China currently lacks comprehensive laws and regulations governing safety management in RSH construction. This paper aims to analyze the behavior of key stakeholders (including households, workmen, rural village committee and the government) and propose recommendations to mitigate safety risks associated with RSH construction.

This paper applies evolutionary game theory to analyze the symbiotic evolution among households, workmen and rural village committee, in situations with or without government participation. Additionally, numerical simulation is utilized to examine the outcomes of various strategies implemented by the government.

Without government participation, households, workmen, and rural village committee tend to prioritize maximizing apparent benefits, often overlooking the potential safety risks. Numerical simulations reveal that while government involvement can guide these parties towards safer decisions, achieving the desired outcomes necessitates the adoption of reasonable and effective strategies. Thus, the government needs to offer targeted subsidies to these stakeholders.

Considering that during the construction phase, stakeholders are the main administrators accountable for safety management. However, there exists insufficient research examining the impact of stakeholder behavior on RSH construction safety. This study aims to analyze the behavior of stakeholders about how to reduce the safety risks in building RSH. Thus, the authors intend to contribute to knowledge in this area by establishing evolutionary game model. Firstly, this study carried out a theoretical by using tripartite evolutionary game to reveal the reasons for the high safety risk during building RSH. Practically, this research points out the important role of households, workmen and rural village committee in improving safety management in rural areas. Besides, some suggestions are proposed to the government about how to reduce construction safety risks in rural areas.

The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, it aims to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the activities and performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) government suppliers involved in government green procurement (GGP). Second, it examines the differences in the impact of COVID-19 between small and medium-sized groups.

The study used a questionnaire survey that was distributed to SMEs listed in the MyHIJAU directory that supply green goods and services to the government. Of the total 394 sample respondents, 126 usable questionnaires were received, representing a usable response rate of 31.98%. Descriptive analysis of mean score, standard deviation and mean score ranking was used to analyse the overall results. A t-test analysis was carried out to examine the differences between the small and medium-sized groups of companies.

The study discovers that the SME government suppliers involved in GGP were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The top ranked impacts are that “the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened health and safety practices among the employees”, “the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced company’s turnover”, “the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the company to implement a cost reduction strategy”, “the COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the company’s ability to deliver work, supplies or services to the government” and “the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the company to incur higher production costs for green products or services provided”. However, there is no significant difference between the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the small and medium-sized group of enterprises.

The present study is among the fewer studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular focus on SME government suppliers involved in GGP.

Decentralised administrative arrangements and the active function of local government organisations are essential to tackle crisis effectively. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this paper examines the central and local government administrative arrangements during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study applies qualitative content analysis and interviews to explore the local government’s role in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 management by interviews of 18 participants including government officials, experts, non-government organisations (NGOs) representatives, and the general public. This paper also analysed academic papers, policy documents and other publicly available documents, including newspaper reports.

The Constitution of Bangladesh intensified the active participation of local government in each administrative unit through decentralised administrative management. This paper however reveals that the administrative arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh was primarily a centrally led system. The local government was not sufficiently involved, nor had it integrated into the planning and coordination process. This indicated the absence of active decentralised administration.

This study fills the research gap of the administrative pattern and local relations in COVID-19 management by exploring the local government’s role during the catastrophic situation and highlights the importance of decentralised administrative actions in managing the crisis.

Green innovation in supply chains is crucial for socioeconomic development and stability. Factors that influence collaborative green innovation in the supply chain are complex and diverse. Exploring the main influencing factors and their mechanisms is essential for promoting collaborative green innovation in supply chains. Therefore, this study analyzes how upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain collaborate to develop green technological innovations, thereby providing a theoretical basis for improving the overall efficiency of the supply chain and advancing green innovation technology.

Based on evolutionary game theory, this study divides operational scenarios into pure market and government-regulated operations, thereby constructing collaborative green innovation relationships in different scenarios. Through evolutionary analysis of various entities in different operational scenarios, combined with numerical simulation analysis, we compared the evolutionary stability of collaborative green innovation behavior in supply chains with and without government regulation.

Under pure market mechanisms, the higher the green innovation capability, the stronger the willingness of various entities to collaborate in green innovation. However, under government regulation, a decrease in green innovation capability increases the willingness to collaborate with various entities. Environmental tax rates and green subsidy levels promote collaborative innovation in the short term but inhibit collaborative innovation in the long term, indicating that policy orientation has a short-term impact. Additionally, the greater the penalty for collaborative innovation breaches, the stronger the intention to engage in collaborative green innovation in the supply chain.

We introduce the factors influencing green innovation capability and social benefits in the study of the innovation behavior of upstream and downstream enterprises, expanding the research field of collaborative innovation in the supply chain. By comparing the collaborative innovation behavior of various entities in the supply chain under a pure market scenario and government regulations, this study provides a new perspective for analyzing the impact of corresponding government policies on the green innovation capability of upstream and downstream enterprises, enriching theoretical research on green innovation in the supply chain to some extent.

From the perspective of local government tax administration, the impact of geographic dispersion on the corporate tax burden is investigated in this paper.

Using unbalanced panel data with a sample of listed companies from 2003 to 2020 in China, this paper focuses on the effect of geographic dispersion on corporate tax burden and the mechanisms.

It is found that corporate tax burden is positively related to geographic dispersion. It is also found that geographic dispersion affects the corporate tax burden by increasing the effort of local government tax administration. In addition, the relation between geographic dispersion and corporate tax burden is more pronounced for local SOEs prior to the implementation of Golden Tax Project III and in cases where local governments face stronger financial pressure to obtain revenue.

This study has important implications for the promotion of the coordinated development of the regional economy, as well as the legalization, modernization and informatization of tax administration.

High-tech enterprises, as the national innovation powerhouses, have garnered considerable interest, particularly regarding their technological innovation capabilities. Nevertheless, prevalent research tends to spotlight the impact of individual factors on innovative behavior, with only a fraction adopting a comprehensive viewpoint, scrutinizing the causal amalgamations of precursor conditions influencing the overall innovation proficiency of high-tech enterprises.

This paper employs a hybrid approach integrating necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the combinatorial effects of antecedent factors on high-tech enterprises' innovation output. Our analysis draws upon data from 46 listed Chinese high-tech enterprises. To promote technological innovation within high-tech enterprises, we introduce a novel perspective that emphasizes technological innovation networks, grounded in a network agents-structure-environment framework. These antecedents are government subsidy, tax benefits, customer concentration, purchase concentration rate, market-oriented index and innovation environment.

The findings delineate four configurational pathways leading to high innovative output and three pathways resulting in low production.

This study thereby enriches the body of knowledge around technological innovation and provides actionable policy recommendations.

This study aims to study the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the relationship between outsourcing and product innovation in entrepreneurial ventures in a transition economy.

The data of 10,296 Vietnamese entrepreneurial ventures from the four rounds of the survey conducted by the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam to investigate the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the association between outsourcing and entrepreneurial ventures’ product innovation performance. The Probit regression model is employed to estimate such associations.

Our research uncovered that the impact of outsourcing on the likelihood of product innovation is more significant for entrepreneurial operations characterized by a substantial degree of private ownership and government backing as opposed to those without.

The results of our research indicated that the resource-based perspective and extended resource-based view (ERBV) are essential in examining the impact of gaining resources or skills from external sources on the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. These ideas have significance and importance not just in industrialized economies but also in countries undergoing transition. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial enterprises should have the ability to manage a wide range of resources and make decisions about which activities should be handled internally and which should be delegated to other parties.

Our findings also imply that entrepreneurial ventures should be able to control many resources and choose which tasks should be performed in-house and which should be outsourced to third parties.

By adopting and leveraging the resource-based view (RBV) and extended resource-based views (ERBV), our study developed a theoretical model about private ownership and government support for moderate outsourcing’s impact on entrepreneurial innovation in a transition economy.

A country’s institutional environment influences every facet of its business. This paper aims to identify institutional factors (state ownership, government attention on employment and employees’ educational background) that affect the asymmetric cost behavior in China.

Using 2,570 listed firms’ data between 2002 and 2015, we use empirical models to explore the effects of state ownership, government attention on employment and employees’ educational background on the asymmetric cost behavior in China.

This study found that the asymmetric cost behavior of central state-owned enterprises (CSOEs) is greater than local state-owned enterprises (LSOEs). Meanwhile, the empirical results show that government attention on employment is reflected in five-year government plans, and employees’ educational backgrounds are positively associated with asymmetric cost behavior.

This study contributes to the economic theory of sticky costs, institutional theory and asymmetric cost behavior literature by providing evidence that shows how government intervention and employee educational background limit the flexibility of corporate cost adjustments. Additionally, this study provides guidance to policymakers by showing how government long-term plans affect firm-level resource adjustment decisions.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is embracing digital transformation and e-government services, aiming to improve efficiency, accessibility and citizen-centricity. Nonetheless, the country faces challenges such as evolving cyber threats. The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors influencing cybersecurity practices to ensure the reliability and security of e-government services.

This paper investigates the multifaceted dynamics of cybersecurity practices and their impact on the quality and effectiveness of e-government services. Five key factors explored include organizational culture, technology infrastructure, adherence to standards and regulations, employee training and awareness and financial investment in cybersecurity. This study used a quantitative method to gather data from 320 participants. The researcher collected 285 completed questionnaires, excluding unusable or incomplete responses, and analyzed the final data set using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The findings show that financial investment in cybersecurity, employee training and awareness and adherence to cybersecurity regulations significantly influence the adoption of robust cybersecurity practices. However, the relationship between organizational culture and cybersecurity practices is less straightforward. The research establishes a strong positive correlation between cybersecurity practices and e-government service quality, highlighting the role of security in fostering public trust and user satisfaction and meeting the evolving needs of citizens and businesses.

This research contributes valuable empirical evidence to the fields of e-government and cybersecurity, offering insights that can inform evidence-based policy decisions and resource allocation. By understanding the nuanced dynamics at play, Saudi Arabia is better poised to fortify its digital governance infrastructure and provide secure, high-quality e-government services to its constituents.