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Brazil’s regional inequality is an important topic due to the large and persistent differences in development between states and the high levels of inequality in the country. These variations in development can potentially render survey data inaccurate since the significance of capital income varies across the states. Besides, previous studies incorporating tax and national accounts data globally have mainly focused on measuring the income distribution at the country-level. This approach can limit the understanding of inequality, especially when considering large countries such as Brazil.

The methodology used to construct these estimates follows the guidelines of the Distributional National Accounts, whose core goal is to provide income distribution measures consistent with macroeconomic aggregates and harmonized across countries and time. The procedure has three main steps: first, it corrects the survey’s underrepresentation of top incomes using tax data. Then, it accounts for national income items not included in the survey or tax data, such as imputed rents and undistributed profits. Finally, it ensures that all components match the national income.

Compared to survey-based estimations, the results reveal a new angle on the state-level inequality. This study indicates that Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have a more concentrated income distribution. The top 1\% of earners in these states receives around 28\% of total pre-tax income, while the top 10\% receive nearly 60\%. On the other end, Amapá (AP), Acre (AC), Rondônia (RO) and Santa Catarina (SC) are the states where the income distribution is less concentrated. There were no significant changes in the income distribution across the states during the period analyzed.

This study combines survey, tax and national accounts data to construct new estimates of Brazil’s state-level income distribution from 2006 to 2019. Previous results only considered income captured in surveys, which usually misses a significant part of capital incomes. This limitation may bias comparisons as capital income has different importance across the states. The new estimates represent the income of top groups more accurately, account for the entire national income and enable to compare regional inequality levels consistently with other countries.

We expand the recent literature on the dynamics of capital structure decisions by investigating the impact of national culture on firms' optimal debt ratios and their dynamic re-adjustment process. To this end, we aim at estimating firm-specific speeds of leverage adjustment, allowing for heterogeneous dynamics in firms' capital structure.

We use dynamic panel data estimators to analyze the impact of cultural factors on the dynamics of debt ratios.

We show that national culture affects the optimal level of leverage and the dynamic rebalancing of debt ratios, both directly and indirectly, by altering the effect of firm characteristics and macroeconomic factors on firms' financing behavior. Firms converge faster towards the optimal leverage in countries with a stronger attitude to conform with the norm, while they are slower where there is a higher propensity to intellectual autonomy. A higher risk aversion and long-run propensity induce over-levered firms to reduce leverage faster, making the adjustment process strongly asymmetric. Moreover, national culture also produces indirect effects by mitigating the impact of asymmetric information on capital structure decisions. Indeed, firms in more individualistic countries display a lower speed of adjustment and a stronger effect of firm characteristics associated with higher agency costs. On the contrary, firms in countries with a higher tendency to conform to social norms, less individualistic and more long-term oriented have a higher adjustment speed and appear to suffer less from agency issues. Our results therefore highlight how national culture affects agency problems within firms, thus suggesting the adoption of country-specific corporate governance provisions accounting for the effects of local cultural traits on managers' behavior.

We expand the capital structure and governance literature by showing how cultural traits impact on the dynamics of debt ratios. In particular, we show how cultural traits may mitigate or exacerbate the role of agency issues on firms' behavior, hence suggesting that cultural factors may interact with governance rules in shaping firms' decisions. Therefore, our work highlights how policy-makers should include cultural aspects when defining regulation concerning corporate governance.

This study examines experiences and enjoyment of national parks in the context of Tanzania.

A cross-sectional design with quantitative and qualitative methods is applied. The study area is Nyerere National Park in Tanzania. Data collected from fully completed structured questionnaires by 360 domestic tourists are subjected to descriptive statistics and Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling analysis. Content analysis is used to analyze qualitative data.

The findings have revealed that there is a significant relationship between direct experiences and enjoyment of southern national parks among domestic tourists.

The suggestion is for future studies to explore a longitudinal approach to determine the patterns of domestic tourists in reference to experiences and enjoyment of national parks so as to improve domestic tourism.

The practical implication is for the government, private sector and tourism stakeholders to improve infrastructure and conduct regular surveys and tour guide training.

This study examines experiences and enjoyment of national parks in the context of Tanzania and, specifically analyzes the relationship between direct experiences and enjoyment of southern national parks among domestic tourists in Tanzania guided by types of tourists’ theory.

The process of performance measurement provides support to company management to achieve the objectives established in strategic planning. Through the definition of critical success factors and related key performance indicators, performance measurement verifies the gap between planned objectives and the results achieved, informing the responsible bodies to enable them to evaluate performance and, if necessary, implement improvement actions. Although many types of companies adopt performance measurement, this process is challenging when applied to national health services. This paper aims to identify the evolution of performance measurement and the critical success factors of national health services.

The authors conducted an explorative case study of a leading national health service to delineate the evolutionary path of performance measurement and the main critical success factors.

The results indicate a significant increase in the maturity of performance measurement of a national health service that has been motivated by international reforms and national regulations. This research highlights performance measurement features such as a balanced set of metrics, targets, and incentives linked to strategic objectives and regular and frequent performance reviews. Furthermore, it identifies the performance measurement model of a leading national health service.

The evolution of performance measurement and numerous critical success factors of national health services are described; the critical success factors cover a wide range of financial to operational aspects such as patient safety, organizational appropriateness, and clinical appropriateness.

The purpose of this paper is to try to reach the main factors that could put national security at risk as a result of government cloud computing programs.

The paper adopts the analytical approach to first lay foundations of the relation between national security, cybersecurity and cloud computing, then it moves to analyze the main vulnerabilities that could affect national security in cases of government cloud computing usage.

The paper reached several findings such as the relation between cybersecurity and national security as well as a group of factors that may affect national security when governments shift to cloud computing mainly pertaining to storing data over the internet, the involvement of a third party, the lack of clear regulatory frameworks inside and between countries.

Governments are continuously working on developing their digital capacities to meet citizens’ demands. One of the most trending technologies adopted by governments is “cloud computing”, because of the tremendous advantages that the technology provides; such as huge cost-cutting, huge storage and computing capabilities. However, shifting to cloud computing raises a lot of security concerns.

The value of the paper resides in the novelty of the topic, which is a new contribution to the theoretical literature on relations between new technologies and national security. It is empirically important as well to help governments stay safe while enjoying the advantages of cloud computing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of fiscal policy, namely, net tax and government expenditure on national saving and its nonlinearity. The author first investigates whether the impacts of fiscal policy on national saving have changed after the global financial crisis of 2008. Then, the author tests the nonlinearity of the relationship by taking account of the economic cycle, namely, economic expansion (boom) and economic recession (bust).

The empirical model bases on a reduced-form equation with national saving as a dependent variable, lagged value of national saving, output gap and fiscal policy as independent variables. The two-step system GMM approach was employed to estimate the empirical model, using a panel of 23 emerging Asian economies in the period of 1990-2015.

The empirical results show that tax policy and expenditure policy follow the predictions of the overlapping generation model with finite horizon and the Keynesian view. The nonlinearity of fiscal policy is twofold. The conduct of fiscal policy in the period after 2008 seems effective, while the effect is insignificant in the period before 2008. Likewise, fiscal policy tends to have more significant effects in bust cycle. The effect of tax policy is increased during recession, while the effect of government spending is more pronounced during economic downturn.

The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it is shown that fiscal policies in the region had more impacts on national saving after the global financial crisis of 2008. Second, the research confirms nonlinear impact of fiscal policy on saving behavior during economic recession and economic boom.

This study aims to provide insight into the current incorporation of corporate culture in national corporate governance codes. The authors identify three levels of incorporation for each of the following three dimensions: layers of corporate culture (the “what”), the alignment of corporate culture in the organization (the “for whom”) and the board’s roles regarding corporate culture (the “how”).

To assess the extent to which national codes have incorporated corporate culture, the authors used a sample of 88 national corporate governance codes. The authors performed a content analysis of these codes using a computer-aided text analysis program. The first step involved the identification of dimensions of corporate culture per national code. These dimensions were then assessed based on three levels of incorporation. Finally, the authors ranked national codes with similar levels of incorporation per dimension and aggregated the dimensions.

The data show that five of the 88 national corporate governance codes that the authors analysed scored the highest level in all three dimensions of corporate culture.

This is the first study to provide an overview of what national corporate governance codes say about corporate culture. The authors address two gaps in the existing literature. First, the authors develop and use a richer conceptualization of how corporate culture can be addressed in national corporate governance codes. Second, the authors analyse these corporate governance codes worldwide.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate if the environment of the National FFA Organization’s Nominating Committee training fosters transfer of training to the job they are required to perform, selecting National FFA Officers. Nominating Committee members, advisors, National FFA staff, and National Officer candidates participated in the study. The research methods included semi-structured focus group interviews, document analysis, and a short survey. Major findings of the study noted that most areas of the training environment encourage transfer; however, some facets of the environment could be improved to promote training transfer. Recommendations include offering pre-convention training materials in a variety of formats, widening the opportunities for pre-convention meetings to accommodate schedules, continuing to allow Nominating Committee members to set their own cultural norms, and clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the adult consultants with respect to the selection process.

This paper aims to assess the comparative position of the national innovation system of Chinese state entrepreneurship versus liberal market entrepreneurship. Based on the comparative institutional framework, it asks whether Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative disadvantage because of its incoherent institutions in liberal or coordinated economies. Hence, does the Chinese institutional system of innovation lag behind that of US or liberal countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies in the transformation of national science into economic products measured as high-technology exports?

This study uses panel data analysis based on 29 OECD economies and the Chinese economy over 23 years. Regarding national science productivity (explorative capabilities), it includes published and patented science streams; regarding technological transformation (exploitative capabilities), it measures the percentage of high-technology exports in gross domestic product (GDP). The interactions between the types of entrepreneurship and national science institutions serve as predictors in the design.

The results show that Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative advantage over liberal economies in published science. However, Chinese state entrepreneurship has a comparative disadvantage compared to liberal entrepreneurship in patent science. Regarding the dyadic level of comparability between the national economies, there are mixed results in the transformation of national science.

This study supports the three following theoretical points: national institutions differ regardless of the pressure of convergence through globalization; national science contingencies influence different paths of the transformation of national science to technology; and mixed economies, such as state entrepreneurship, can achieve high performance without fully conforming to liberal markets.

This study emphasizes institutional mechanisms for future research to support the innovation of incoherent institutions and suggests the benefit of cross-pollination of senior managers between state and private organizations for a defined duration.

Theoretically, this research combines an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional level of analysis, and in so doing, it deals with the transformation of national science in scientific publications and patents in the vertical value chain. Empirically, this study links the national published and patented science with the national economic artifacts in high-technology sectors. This novel approach to assess the national and discipline-level interaction sets a context for the future research in other settings. It also informs policy decisions regarding the growth of science, innovation and development.

This study aims to examine whether national industry expertise in Italy is more dominant than local expertise. Prior studies from Australia, USA and UK show that audit fees for industry experts are priced at a higher premium at the local level than the national level. These countries have voluntary audit firm rotation, while Italy has mandatory audit firm rotation (MAFR). The authors predict that Italy has a stronger national than local level of industry expertise, to better retain and transfer industry expertise.

The authors compare audit fee premiums of national industry experts to local levels, using quantitative (multivariate tests) and qualitative (interviews) methodology.

Using hand-collected audit fees, the authors find that the audit fee premium for industry expertise is greater at the national level than the local level. The authors find corroborating results with audit hours. To provide further support, the authors conduct analysis for a neighboring country that does not have audit firm rotation. Using hand-collected data from Germany, the authors find that audit fee premiums from national industry expertise are no different from local industry expertise.

The present study study has theoretical and practical implications, for European Union countries, which recently adopted MAFR and for countries considering adoption in the future.