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This paper illustrates the socio-political nature of accountings, referring to the partial privatisation of the monopoly telecommunications organisation in a lower-middle-income country.

Actor-network theory and an ANTi-history approach are used to trace circumstances and occurrences. Empirical materials include official documents, print media and retrospective interviews with organisation employees ten years on from the privatisation.

Proponents of privatisation used retrospectively constructed historical accounts to problematise the natural monopoly of telecommunications and the government organisation administering it. A restructuring programme followed. Proponents addressed controversies pertaining to the programme thus garnering widespread support for complex and controversial changes. Proponents produced and reproduced accounting artefacts as evidence in these processes of history reconstruction, consequent changes and restoring stability to telecommunications in its reconfigured commercial domain. The proponents used selective, controversial accounting evidence to problematise the government organisation's existence, then to mobilise various actors to reduce and close the controversies previously aroused and reinstate stability in a partially privatised telecommunications company. Although no longer having a monopoly this company still dominates. Dissenters did the same but with little success.

The findings demonstrate the importance of tracing the socio-political process of arriving at the dominant outcome about the past. This assists in making sense of present circumstances and re-imagining the future.

The study demonstrates that, during controversial circumstances, taken-for-granted history, as well as what is thought to have not existed in the past, support the dominant network in gaining advantage over their opponents and black-boxing their perspectives of how things should be.

Motivated by the news media and a lack of comprehensive research on the USA, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between changes in road fatalities and gasoline prices, per capita disposable personal income, alcohol consumption per adult, blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits and gender.

This study employs both static and dynamic panel data models, making use of annual data over the 2000–2013 period collected from the 50 states of the USA and the consistent system GMM estimators of the parameters, to estimate the impact of these variables on fatalities per 100,000 persons and per 100,000 vehicles.

The results highlight the importance of gasoline prices in determining the level of road fatalities, underscoring that a 10 percent decrease in gasoline prices leads to a 248 increase in the total number of road fatalities, but with many more injuries. Increases in the female-to-total driver ratio have a greater significant positive impact on road fatalities where a 10 percent increase in this ratio increases road fatalities by 1,008 deaths. Increases in registered vehicles per capita also increase the number of fatalities. Other variables such as alcohol consumption per adult and BAC limits are not as important. Policy implications are also provided.

The results of this study highlight the importance of gasoline prices in determining the number of road fatalities. This factor can be an effective policy measure by which policymakers can offset increases in fatalities due to further drastic declines in future gasoline prices. But the effects of the gasoline prices in determining the number of road fatalities are not as strong as the media would lead us to believe. The media ignores the impact of other factors on fatalities, which results in an overestimation of the impact of gasoline prices.

This study uses the panel data of 50 US states and the dynamic panel data model. In addition to gasoline price effects on the road fatalities, this study also considers other factors such as gender, gasoline taxes, per capita disposable personal income, per capita alcohol consumption, BAC limits and number of registered vehicles.

This paper aims to identify the reasons for the lower ranking of the Online Service Index of Sri Lanka under the United Nations E-Government Readiness Index. The study is conducted as a comparative study on selected Asian countries and suggests remedial measures for the improvement of the status of e-government of Sri Lanka.

In this regard, as the sample of websites ranked according to the Online Service Index of the United Nations, five government websites of Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Singapore were selected. They are the national portal and the websites of the five Ministries: The Ministry of Education, Finance, Health, Labor and of Social Services. Asian countries selected are India, Bangladesh and Singapore including Sri Lanka. Observation method was the mainly used method for data collection. The websites were evaluated in contrast with the help of the “Main features reviewed by the United Nations E-government Survey” as the checklist. Substantial description and scoring methods were used for the analysis of the data and the presentation of the findings of the study.

Thus, several weaknesses of the online services of the government websites of Sri Lanka were identified. Among them, the major reasons identified for the lower rank of the Sri Lankan Online Service Index were, for example, the inability to identify the exact website of national portal, the lack of accessibility or usability features, the weaknesses in the active maintenance of the “Contact us” feature, service-delivery capability features, citizen participation and also interconnectedness features. The above weaknesses have been the key/root causes for the decline of the rank of the Online Service Index of Sri Lanka.

From five government websites, selected three foreign Asian countries were in focus because of practical limitations. Another difficulty faced in the analysis and comparison of the websites was that the information with regard to the United Nations evaluation methodology/criteria has not been adequately provided.

The findings of this study provide information for the policy makers, web standards, evaluation criteria developers and almost all the government organizations to address key issues related to this field for the maximization of citizen participation, the enhancement of the service-delivery capabilities and accessibility features of websites to improve the online services of the government. This study unfolded several areas for the future researchers. Those researches can also be conducted based on sub indexes of the United Nations E-Government Readiness Index. The same method could be used to examine Human Capital Index, Telecommunication and Infrastructure Index and Citizen Participation Index. This research could also be expanded through observations of foreign countries.

This paper provides an overview of the quality of government websites of Sri Lanka compared to the selected Asian countries. Through the utilization of this scoring method, four major weaknesses that contribute to the lower ranking of the online service of Sri Lanka were identified with suggestions indented for the improvement of the government websites.