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In the wake of severe socio-economic damage, many firms have made creative and technological progress in their responses to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper examines internal and external environmental complexity elements as antecedents of business responses and builds a framework for tourism firms to respond to the pandemic crisis.

This study obtained survey data from 395 respondents in the Vietnamese tourism and hospitality industry. A partial least squares structural equation modeling–artificial neural network approach was used to examine various combinations of internal and external environmental complexity elements that have different impacts on business responses and firms' performance.

The knowledge and practice created by the firm's employees (individual creativity), obtained from traditional contexts (traditionality) were identified as internal environmental complexity factors while practice learned from other firms (mimetic pressure), information processing (status certainty) and digital transformation (digital technology speed) were treated as external environmental complexity factors. Internal and external environmental complexity factors influence business responses and firms' performance positively but differently.

This study demonstrates that firms should integrate their internal environment of creativity and traditionality with external environmental factors of mimetic pressure, status certainty and digital technology speed to create better business responses, and thus firm performance in the COVID-19 era.

This investigation contributes to environmental research and narrows the existing research gap relating to the association between types of environmental complexity and firms' responsive action, which then influence firms' performance in terms of sustainable competitiveness.

This study aims to analyze the effects of e-government on corruption prevalence by using a sample of 29 European countries over the period 2012–2019.

This paper uses the panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) model to mitigate the problems of cross-sectional dependence. The PCSE model is also considered to reexamine the findings when the presence of heteroscedasticity, fixed effects and endogeneity issues are taken into account. The theoretical model incorporates one-year-lagged explanatory variables to deal with endogeneity. The autoregressive distributed lag method using the dynamic fixed effects estimator is chosen to deal with the time and country-fixed effects in the effort to measure the short- and long-run effects of e-government more precisely.

The results indicate that e-government plays a critical role in improving the population’s perception of corruption. Furthermore, e-government appears to have an effect in the short run. Notably, the estimation results show that there is a nonlinear relationship between e-government, especially user centricity and key enablers and the corruption perception index in the U-shaped curve.

The short-run and nonlinear effects of e-government on corruption prevalence suggest that the fight against corruption requires countries to pursue a consistent and continuous improvement and development of the e-government system.

The authors contribute to the literature by providing a consistent and precise answer to this relationship in the case of European countries. Another contribution of the work is to use diverse indicators to reflect e-government in a typical country, which helps us confirm the reliability and robustness of the findings.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of monitoring local authorities on the quality of governance and public services reported by citizens in Vietnam, using the Vietnam Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) surveys.

PAPI randomly selected 200 locations in 93 districts of 30 provinces to conduct its survey in 2010, and subsequently rolled out the survey nationally in 2011 and 2012. Using 2011 and 2012 survey data, the authors compare the quality of governance and public services reported in provinces and districts that were covered in the 2011 PAPI survey with those that were not surveyed in 2010. Theories suggest that local authorities may improve their behavior if they have been surveyed and are, thus, aware that they are being monitored, leading to higher quality governance.

In this paper, the authors find that governance quality reported in later years by citizens in the surveyed provinces and districts of the 2010 PAPI survey was significantly higher than the quality reported by citizens in locations that were not surveyed in 2010. Monitoring appears to improve a wide range of governance aspects, including local participation in village decisions, transparency of local decision-making, accountability, administrative procedures and public service delivery.

The main innovation of this study is to use a randomized survey on governance as a natural experiment to measure the impact of monitoring on the quality of governance and public services, as reported by citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether higher levels of transparency, accountability, and participation have a statistically significant association with corruption, and whether corruption is highly correlated with lower public service quality in the context of Vietnam’s transition economy.

Using individual-level survey data from Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index, the research employs an ordered probit model to test whether greater transparency, accountability, and participation is associated with lower levels of corruption. Moreover, district-level data are used to test the relationship between corruption and quality of public services particularly in healthcare and primary education.

Results show that a higher level of transparency, participation, and accountability is associated with a lower level of corruption, and that corruption is negatively associated with public service quality.

The use of cross-sectional data does not allow the establishment of causal relationships among variables.

The research suggests that fostering accountability to citizens and non-state sectors and promotion of genuine participation from these actors are critical for the future anti-corruption agenda.

In developing countries, whether corruption enhances efficiency of service provision is highly debatable. This research contributes to this debate by suggesting that corruption significantly decreases the quality of public service, and that improving local governance helps reduce corruption.