Social Determinants and E-disclosure: Empirical Evidence from Spain

In the last few years, new communication tools have been changing the relationship between administration and citizens in order to enhance public accountability that is essential for government transparency. Public accountability and transparency on the web are topics that have attracted the interest of several scholars, who have begun to investigate the determinants of disclosure. The local government’s websites have become the main channel for communication with stakeholders and the most important disclosure tools. This paper explores the use of websites by local governments; especially, its aim is to find out which social determinants predict the diffusion of e-disclosure in the public sector in light of agency theory and neo-institutional theory. In particular, the paper contributes to increasing the literature on the e-disclosure, moreover, the scoring system for the e-disclosure analysis in public local government is proposed. The analysis is carried out on a sample of local governments (LGs) in Spain during 2012

From theory to practice: first adoption of Integrated Reporting by the Italian Public Utilities

Corporate reporting has been recently changed by the globalization of economies, crises, the adoption of new legislative acts and the growing demand for information. This significant change is due also to the evolution of the stakeholders’ information needs, which are increasingly dedicated to nonfinancial information regarding, among other things, governance, strategy and the environmental policy. Integrated reporting has been framed and developed in response to those changes. It aims at providing readers with a better comprehension of the organization needed to create value over the short and the medium-long term, combining financial and non-financial information. This paper aims at providing initial empirical considerations on the quality of the integrated reports (IRs) published by Public Utilities (PUs) attending the Pilot Programme (PP) and having a public sector ownership

Human Resource Measurement: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

This study aims to adopt the balanced scorecard approach to improve the measurement and evaluating of human resources performance in the USA public sector. We use a balanced scorecard approach in terms of innovation, learning and growth for employees feeling to contribute to the governmental agency ends. Innovation, learning and growth may represent constitutive elements of organizational strategies value oriented. In this study we have built a set of key performance drivers drawn by a sample of American public employees during 2010. The United States are the first country introducing public management reform programs fostering continuous attention on human resources performances. The study is a research desk. Data are collected by United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) with regard to last Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey conducted in 2010 and concern employees of every Federal agencies which responded to the survey. The results show that the employee’s perception of the organization performance seems to be positively judged

The determinants of e-disclosure attitude: empirical evidences from Italian and Spanish municipalities

Research investigates the attitude to the information disclosure via website, analysing a sample of 287 Italian and Spanish municipalities. A Tobit regression approach is adopted to explore the main determinants of e-disclosure. The findings show that municipality’s factors like Internet visibility, wealth and leverage play an important role to determine the level of e-disclosure. In addition, a cluster analysis highlights that in Italy there is a greater level of e-disclosure than in Spain, revealing a set of specific elements that characterize municipalities with higher disclosure