The article examines the importance of democracy and freedom to budget transparency that contributes to government responsiveness and accountability to citizens. It investigates the question: What are the effects of democracy and freedom on budget transparency? Using the 2019 data from the International Budget Partnership that scored countries’ budget transparency practices and ordinary least squares multivariate regression, findings show that countries that score high on democracy and freedom tend to report higher budget transparency scores. The study attests to and validates the importance of democracy and freedom and the recognition that these principles should be incorporated as core values in government administration.

This study examines the potential of public e-procurement to serve as a means to counteract corruption in Somalia. Coupled with Generalized Linear Regression (GLM), survey research design is employed to investigate the dynamics between different e-procurement components and factors associated with corruption, such as monopoly power, asymmetric information, transparency, and accountability. The research focuses on ministries and government departments in Mogadishu, encompassing all 25 federal ministries in the sample. The findings reveal that public e-procurement is linked to a reduction in monopoly power, indicating a decline in the influence of single suppliers in the market. Additionally, e-procurement diminishes asymmetric information in the procurement process, promoting fairness and equal access to information for all stakeholders. The study further confirmed a positive relationship between e-procurement adoption and heightened transparency and accountability within public procurement processes. The implications of these findings are significant for policymakers, underscoring the value of investing in e-procurement infrastructure to foster integrity, operational efficiency, and public trust in the realm of public procurement.

This paper aims to explore what has caused nurses to engage in organizational learning since Covid-19. The empirical sample comprises 27 semi-structured interviews with nurses working full-time in public hospitals in the context of the developing economy of Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts. The findings include the following three categories of factors: individual (discretionary power, ensuring care to large numbers of patients), contextual (absence of stakeholder pressure, poor funding and resources, lack of communication) and job-related factors (long working hours and demanding duties, low status of nurses) that determine the engagement of nurses in organizational learning. This paper contributes to the literature in public administration, human resources management, organizational learning and healthcare management as a pioneering study specifically addressing organizational learning among nurses before and after Covid-19 in a developing country (Egypt).

This article analyses the effect of acts of corruption committed by officials in charge of the financial management of municipalities on the mobilization of local public revenue in Cameroon. From a sample of 213 communes out of the 360 in Cameroon, we specify and estimate a panel data model using the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) method over the period 2010–2020. Our results show that corruption measured by convictions of officials in charge of the financial management of municipalities by the financial jurisdiction of accounts in Cameroon reduces local public revenue. Our results identify tax compliance captured through access to education, health and average per capita income as the main transmission channels. The study calls for the intensification of controls on the financial management of municipalities and the strengthening of sanctions imposed on public officials who have been convicted of financial embezzlement.

Ethics management remains a grey area, especially in how developing countries organise and manage their public finances and administrative activities. This paper draws on a descriptive statistical analysis to explore managers’ perceptions of whether appropriate procedures and sanctions exist against fraud or wrongdoing and whether organisational mechanisms and management of human resources promote ethical conduct in Uganda and Kenya. It explores the central tendencies of Ugandan (N = 122) and Kenyan (N = 104) managers’ perceptions of ethics management in their own organisations. The findings show that despite critical challenges, there is progress towards improving ethics management conditions through the drafting of specific anti-fraud policies and guidelines, the promotion of ethical conduct, and the higher individual propensities to report observed fraud by managers.

Contemporary educational studies on anti-corruption have largely been underpinned by the conception of corruption as a moral problem. Consequently, anti-corruption curricula were mainly developed around instilling the correct moral orientations, characters, or decisions in individuals. The current study departs from such theoretical approaches by critically deconstructing dominant discourses constituting anti-corruption education in an underrepresented yet highly relevant setting: Indonesia, a country deemed one of the most corrupt globally. Analyzing Indonesian anti-corruption educational policies, learning modules, textbooks, and other relevant anti-corruption campaign materials, the current study unearthed two dominant discourses in Indonesian anti-corruption education materials. The first is a discourse of neoliberalism, and the second is a discourse of individual morality and heroism. We discuss these findings in relation to the ways Western-originated agendas of rationalism, neoliberal capitalism, and individualism have become the central organizing principles through which anti-corruption educational praxis is imagined and enacted in the Global South. We propose that Indonesian anti-corruption education might find benefits in adopting critical and decolonial approaches to corruption and education more broadly.

Corruption is recurrent in conversations and political debates, but it can have different meanings. This study aimed to assess how the words that 1,020 citizens and 120 politicians in Portugal associated with corruption interacted and varied. Data came from two surveys that collected responses to “What words do you associate with corruption?” from October 2020 to April 2021: the EPOCA-FCT survey conducted with citizens and the ETHICS-FFMS survey conducted with MPs and local elected officials in office. We used network analysis to find that the mass-elite incongruence when defining corruption can be used (a) to enhance corruption surveys and (b) as a tool to foster political will for anti-corruption reform in areas/sectors that are linked to corruption. In Portugal, corruption came down to “theft of money by politicians” (citizens) and “dishonesty and illegality in a crony relationship” (politicians), and the promotion of integrity in the Banking sector emerged as central to any anti-corruption reform. This was the first attempt to show that knowing what citizens and politicians have in mind can be a valid tool to enhance both the quality of future corruption surveys and the implementation of anti-corruption policies when no short-term political will for a change exists.

The environment of critical care units is a highly stressful situation where nurses face critical decisions and daily confrontations with ethical dilemmas. Thus, this study aimed to examine the relationship between the ethical behavior of a co-worker, ethical climate, self-ethical behavior, and job satisfaction among Jordanian critical care nurses. A cross-sectional design was used to perform this study. A convenience sampling method was adopted, and data were collected from 376 registered nurses from two health sectors (government and private) from March to May of 2022. Findings revealed the mean scores of ethical behavior of co-worker, ethical climate, self-ethical behavior, and job satisfaction were as follows: 3.07 (SD = 0.73) out of 4, 3.57 (SD = 0.65) out of 5, 3.45 (SD = 0.49) out of 5, and 3.20 (SD = 0.60) out of 6, respectively. There were positive relationships between job satisfaction and the ethical behavior of co-worker, ethical climate, and self-ethical behavior. Therefore, this study could direct hospital administrators and healthcare professionals to develop proper strategies for promoting job satisfaction among critical care nurses, possibly by focusing on ethical behaviors and climates. Also, healthcare organizations can foster job satisfaction among critical care nurses by creating a more conducive work environment for nurses.