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Online transparency has become a tool to increase legitimacy and trust in governments. The purpose of this paper is to study the online transparency of Spanish Central Government agencies and analyze whether their corporate governance (CG) structures influence their online transparency.

The information used for building an online transparency index and about the board of directors has been collected from the websites of the 168 agencies and from their statutes and activity reports. Ordinary least squares analysis is used. Based on a previous literature review and the requirements of the EU Directive and Spanish legislation, 108 items included in the websites have been analyzed.

The average information displayed through the website agencies is significantly less than the information considered as relevant in previous literature and in the Spanish legislation. The highest values are presented by the technical dimensions and the lowest by the organizational/political dimension. The presence of independent directors and women on the boards of directors are revealed as the most important explanatory factors of online transparency.

Practical implications to improve online transparency are related to the organizational/political dimension – including the positions and CVs of members of governing bodies, minutes, etc. and to the presence of independent directors and, to a lesser extent, of women, on the board of directors.

The contribution of this paper is the identification of some online transparency determinants in public entities under the same general legal framework. This is the first paper that analyzes the relationship between online transparency and CG in public agencies.

The objective of this paper is twofold: first to determine to what extent Spanish public hospitals are using their web sites to provide useful information to users and to improve hospital‐patient relationships, and second to determine which factors have an influence on web site adoption and level of development over time.

The web sites of public hospitals were searched for and analysed in 2005 and 2008. Their contents and features were scored using an 86‐item checklist. Several hypotheses were proposed regarding the influence of internal and external factors on web site adoption and level of development. Logit and linear regressions were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Half of the Spanish public hospitals do not have a web site. The hospital web sites were acceptable in the information dimension but should improve their interactive features, as well as their navigation and usability. No significant improvements were observed during the period analysed. The size of the hospitals was a determining factor for web site adoption and level of development in both years. However, from 2005 to 2008, external factors – in particular internet penetration – became a significant factor to explain the adoption and level of development of web sites.

Citizens are increasingly relying on the internet to search for health‐related information. Hospital managers should exploit the advantages of implementing and properly developing a web site in order to improve the patient‐care provider relationships and offer citizens reliable information about healthcare.

To date, no empirical study has analysed the factors that influence the implementation of hospital web sites or the evolution of their contents and quality over time.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an empirical study of the advances and trends of e‐government in transparency, openness and hence accountability in European Union (EU) local governments to determine the extent to which the internet promotes the convergence towards more transparent and accountable government. The paper also tests the extent to which different factors related to the implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), the number of inhabitants and the type of public administration style have influenced e‐government developments in the cities studied.

A comprehensive content analysis of 75 local government web sites was conducted using a 73‐item evaluation questionnaire. The evaluations were performed in 2004 and 2007 and 15 EU countries were covered (five per country). To analyse the evolution of e‐government, several techniques were used: tests of difference of means, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. The contribution of the different contextual factors to the development of government web sites was tested with OLS regression analysis.

The results show noticeable progress in the application of ICTs and increasing EU local government concern for bringing government closer to citizens and for giving an image of modernity and responsiveness, although few web sites show clear signs of real openness to encouraging citizen dialogue. The evolution of the e‐government initiatives analysed shows that, at present, they are still overlapped with the public administration style of each country as an extension of traditional front offices with potential benefits in speed and accessibility.

Although a growing number of e‐government studies are appearing, previous research has not analysed the evolution of EU local governments from a comparative perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how local governments implement non‐mandatory performance measures (PM), the types of PM employed, the degree of their usefulness in decision making and/or accountability, and their outcomes.

The information was collected through a questionnaire sent to the expert managers in charge of developing PM for Spanish local governments with more than 50,000 inhabitants. In addition, data sources were triangulated through an analysis of the performance indicators published in the notes to the local governments' financial statements and in their web sites.

The implementation of PM in Spain follows a top‐down approach in which each local government can choose whether to implement PM, how to implement them, and what information to disclose. Implementation features a high degree of involvement on the part of managers and little involvement on the part of medium‐ and street‐level staff. PM are used primarily for budgetary and strategic management planning and long‐term decision making.

The paper will be useful to academics and practitioners to enable better understanding of the problems associated with introducing and using non‐financial, non‐mandatory PM. The Spanish case is similar to that of most continental European countries, in the leeway their local governments have in implementing their own PM systems.

The paper sheds light on the application of an interesting aspect of public sector management accounting and contributes to the literature by analyzing the application of a non‐mandatory PM system in a non‐Anglo‐American context.

The objective of this paper is to study the development of e‐government initiatives at the regional and local level in the EU through the opinion of those agents directly involved in the projects.

The authors wrote a questionnaire that was sent to the regions and the largest cities of EU countries, in order to find out their degree of involvement in e‐government initiatives. Responses were received from 47 regional and local governments.

At present, most regional and local governments have a web site, although in most cases it is little more than a governmental billboard. E‐government is not likely to remodel governance in the short term, since democracy initiatives are not on the present agenda of most EU countries. The survey findings show that e‐government initiatives are still predominantly non‐interactive and non‐deliberative. They tend to reflect present service delivery patterns, not transform them.

The construction and management of web sites is becoming an essential element of modern public administration, but little is known about how these initiatives are being implemented. Given the substantial investment in time and other resources for governmental online initiatives, it is essential to begin to evaluate governmental web site initiatives in terms of quality and effectiveness.

This work is of value as, to date, there are very few studies that benchmark local government web sites across the EU.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic and technological factors that determine the quality of European telecommunications services. The paper test whether the privatisation, the efficiency and the labour factor of telecommunications operators are determinants of service quality and whether competition, technology and infrastructure investment in the telecommunications sector influence that quality.

The paper use the panel data methodology to analyse the factors that determine the quality of service of telecommunications.

The results indicate that the more efficient the company is, the more quality it will deliver. However, the paper finds no evidence that the privatisation and the restructuring of the labour force of the main telecommunications operators, or the competition, technology and investments in the sector, lead to greater quality.

In order to foster higher quality, effective market competitiveness has to be established to avoid benefitting the incumbent company and to make the development of competition possible in the long run.

Although previous literature assumes a positive relationship between the performance of privatised companies and quality, this study shows that the privatisation and liberalisation processes do not bring about quality improvements by themselves. The research finds that the efficiency of privatised companies is the primary source of quality.

The aim of the paper is to compare consumer acceptance, sensory analysis and volatile compounds of caiman meat with regard to surubí fish and chicken meat.

Caiman tail, chicken thigh and surubí meats' cuts were cooked in a pan with little oil and salt. The affective tests of acceptance (9-points hedonic scale) and preference ranking were evaluated by 80 consumers. Sensory analysis carried out by eight trained panelists described attributes' intensities on an unstructured linear scale (0–150 mm). Volatile compounds were analysed by solid-phase micro-extraction and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry GC–MS.

Caiman meat had good acceptance values of 6–7 (“like slightly” to “like moderately”), being similarly preferred to surubí but less than chicken. The ratings of bitterness, hardness, fibrous appearance, fibrous texture and cohesiveness were higher and raw colour, characteristic flavour and oiliness were lower in caiman's meat than in the others. Caiman meat had lower juiciness than chicken but similar to surubí. Caiman showed lower levels of aldehydes than chicken, lower level of hydrocarbons and higher levels of acids and esters than the other meats. Alcohols, mainly found in caiman and chicken meat, were positively associated to aroma acceptance. Hydrocarbons, mainly found in surubí meat, were positively associated with the characteristic flavour and negatively correlated with aroma acceptance. Volatile composition of meats was related to their sensory attributes and consumer acceptance.

Given that caiman meat showed similar acceptance and preference to that of surubí, it could be considered a good quality meat, helping promote current programmes of sustainable use of natural resources.

This research analyzes the roles of users in innovative digital health collaborative projects from the perspective of the user by considering three dimensions: their motivation, project activities and the support of the partnership for their effective involvement.

The authors unraveled profiles of users by using a Q-methodological analysis of 24 statements and 44 service users. The statements for the three dimensions were designed according to previous models of stakeholder identification and customer participation in new product management.

The authors obtained two profiles that advocate active participation of users, though with a different degree of involvement. One of them supports the role of users as “advisors” of users' preferences and needs, and the other indicates a higher involvement of users as “cocreators” of the innovation, with the same contribution and responsibility as the other partners.

Previous research has analyzed user involvement in digital health, as part of wider research on factors leading to the success and adoption of innovations. Moreover, previous research has analyzed user involvement in innovation projects, but without differentiating between projects carried out by an individual organization and those conducted by a partnership. This research contributes to filling this gap by revealing users' expectations about their involvement and how they think they will fit in with the dynamics of collaborative projects.

In recent years, most Organisation for Economic and Cooperation Development (OECD) countries have brought in important reforms into their public accounting systems with the objective of both improving public service management and increasing the transparency and accountability of governments. Reforms of government accounting share a common direction towards the implementation of accrual-based accounting systems. In this context, this paper presents the situation of local government accounting systems in European countries with the aim of showing the degree of uniformity/ heterogeneity that currently exists among the countries considered and why differences persist nowadays, trying to classify countries into groups according to accounting practice. Results show that three groups of countries can be identified: the first continues using the cash basis; in the second, an accrual or modified accrual basis is used for financial accounting but the cash basis still persists in the budgetary system; in the third, an accrual or modified accrual basis is used both in budget and in financial accounting.