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This chapter aims to examine the influence of governance on entrepreneurship in several countries, members of the European Union, in 2012–2017. The selection of the countries was based on human development index and expected years of schooling criteria, thus considering several sustainable development goals, involving the governments’ roles, the private sector, civil society, and citizens. The empirical analysis consisted of correlations, principal component analysis, and regression models. The Pearson correlation coefficient evidenced a series of negative relationships, statistically significant, between the governance indicators and business demography. The principal component analysis returned two main components for our database: the main one incorporates five governance proxies (control of corruption, rule of law, regulatory framework, government effectiveness, and political stability), while the second component is based on the voice and accountability. Therefore, the first governance component is more related to the public sector, while the second one reflects the involvement of civil society. The regression analysis considered besides the ordinary least squares model, the fixed effects and random effects model to emphasize whether or not differences across countries would impact the regression results. Several entrepreneurship variables were employed as dependent variables: business demography, high growth enterprise rates by employment, employer enterprise net growth, and business demography by size class. The consistent regression results emphasized an indirect impact from public governance toward high growth enterprise rates by employment and employer enterprise net growth. Based on our findings, the main conclusion is that public policies do not support entrepreneurship or the national context for entrepreneurs’ development. Moreover, the citizens’ involvement and their opportunities to participate in public decisions in terms of supporting entrepreneurship are also limited.

Purpose and need for study: This study examines whether or not culture has a strong influence on the digitalisation of public services, including the adoption of an electronic tax system. The literature analysed made us consider the differentiation between developed and developing countries.

Methodology: To test the nexus between culture and digital public services (DPS), this study highlights the impact of culture, from various dimensions, on e-government in European Union member countries, over the period 2014–2018. Accordingly, the analysis proposes a methodological approach on multiple regression analysis, a method widely used in the social sciences for modelling and analysing several variables presumed to be in a relationship. Given that electronic taxation has no explicit index, but electronic government focusses on how effectively and efficiently government services are delivered to citizens and businesses, the proposed research employs the DPS indicator, part of the composite index of Digital Economy and Society Index. The independent variables employed in the study refer to the six dimensions of the national culture from Hofstede.

Findings: Empirical results reveal that cultural dimensions such as uncertainty avoidance, power distance and masculinity are significantly influencing the efficiency of e-government, carrying a negative influence for the sample of EU member states. Accordingly, a more developed e-government system is expected from countries presenting lower values of the three cultural dimensions. When analysing the sub-samples consisting of developed versus developing countries, results indicate better DPS for societies concerned for short-term gratification and spending (based on a negative influence from the long-term orientation dimension). Specific to developed economies and Northern countries was the fact that e-government is positively influenced by more individualistic societies, and by societies that require rigid codes of conduct and structured circumstances.

Practical implications: The practical contribution of this study is the provision of an extensive overview of the relationship between culture and DPS that could serve as useful information for researchers and practitioners, governments and e-government stakeholders.

The study investigates the inter-linkages between geopolitical risk (GPR) and food price (FP).

By employing the bootstrap full- and sub-sample rolling-window Granger causality tests.

The empirical results show that there is a time-varying bidirectional causality between GPR and FP. High GPR leads to a rise in FP, suggesting that geopolitical events usually may disrupt supply and demand conditions in food markets, and even trigger global food crises. However, the negative effect of GPR on FP does not support this view in certain periods. This is mainly because GPR is also related to the global economic situation and oil price, which together have impacts on the food market. These results cannot always be supported by the inter-temporal capital asset pricing model, which states that GPR affects FP in a positive manner. Conversely, there is a positive impact of FP on GPR, indicating that the food market is an effective tool that can reflect global geopolitical environment.

In the context of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, these analyses can assist investors and policymakers to understand the sensitivity of FP to GPR. Also, it will provide significant revelations for governments to attach importance to the role of food price information in predicting geopolitical events, thus contributing to a more stable international environment.