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This study draws on neoclassical and behavioural economics theories to provide an empirical insight into the effect of knowledge, costs, and social norms on damp-proofing residential buildings in Ghana.

This study used the quantitative approach involving survey data. A sample size of 242 participants was involved in the study. Applying principal component analysis on the responses from the participants, an index for damp-proofing, cost, knowledge, and social norms was derived. After generating the indexes, the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was applied to estimate the impact of knowledge, costs, and social norms on damp-proofing.

The results from the OLS regression revealed that knowledge has a significant positive effect on damp-proofing while costs and social norms have significant negative effect on damp-proofing in Ghana. This study, therefore, concludes that although neoclassical economic factors such as knowledge and cost affect behaviour (damp-proofing), behavioural factors such as social norms also matter.

The outcome of this study calls for policymakers to consider putting in place measures that increase knowledge and promote the use of damp-proofing techniques during the construction of buildings. In addition, the study calls for scholars to partake in collaborative research amongst disciplines such as economics, psychology, and the construction industry in order to provide more innovative solutions, the key of which is finding innovative ways to damp proof buildings.

This study is original in its context as it draws on neoclassical and behavioural economics theories to provide an empirical insight into the effect of knowledge, costs, and social norms on damp-proofing of residential buildings in Ghana. This is an area that has received less attention in the areas of building biology and building pathology globally.

Review of literature suggests mixed findings on the relationship between the church and micro women entrepreneurship development. This signals that questions remain about the roles of churches in entrepreneurial development. Thus, this paper aims to explore what entrepreneurial activities are provided by churches to their micro women entrepreneurs and how do these activities influence their entrepreneurial start up and growth.

Phenomenological research methodologies were used to purposive collected data from 38 women entrepreneurs and four church administers in Tema. Results were analyzed using the emergent strategy.

The results suggest that churches provided four entrepreneurial activities which are categorized as finance, networking, promotion of self-confidence and impartation of ethical values. These factors promoted the growth of women entrepreneurial growth but not the start-up of entrepreneurial ventures. The study concluded that the church should provide more support for new entrepreneurial ventures. Therefore, embeddedness because of membership of a church is a critical part of women entrepreneurship development.

Further studies will need to replicate these findings with other types of businesses, in other locations.

This study suggests that policymakers should be working in conjunction with churches in a bid to promote micro women entrepreneurship development.

Limited research has been conducted on church entrepreneurial activities in the development of micro women entrepreneurs in developing economies such as Ghana. This empirical research provides important insights into this field.

Recent reports based on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) have revealed that no country is in line with achieving the targets of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, with the slowest progress being witnessed mainly on goals that are focused on the environment. This study examines environmental performance indicators for assessing the sustainability of building projects.

The study uses an explanatory sequential design with an initial quantitative instrument phase, followed by a qualitative data collection phase. An extensive critical comparative review of the literature resulted in the identification of ten environmental sustainability indicators. One hundred and sixty-seven questionnaire responses based upon these indicators from the Ghanaian construction industry were received. Data were coded with SPSS v22, analysed descriptively, and via inferential analysis. These data were then validated through semi-structured interviews with six interviewees who are fellows of their respective professional bodies, a senior academic (professor in construction project delivery) and a government official. Data obtained from the semi-structured validation interviews were analysed through the side-by-side comparison of the qualitative data with the quantitative data.

The findings from the study suggest that all the indicators were important in assessing building projects' environmental sustainability across the entire life cycle. Key among the identified indicators is the effects of the project on “water quality, air quality, energy use and conservation, and environmental compliance and management”. The interviewees further agreed to and confirmed the importance of these identified indicators for assessing the environmental sustainability of building projects in Ghana.

Compared to existing studies, this study adopts the exploratory sequential design to identify and examine the critical indicators in assessing the environmental sustainability across the entire lifecycle of building projects in a typical developing country setting, i.e. Ghana. It reveals areas of prime concern in the drive to place the local construction industry on a trajectory towards achieving environmental sustainability.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of extant literature on supplier selection by identifying drivers of integration of Environmental Sustainability (ES) into supplier selection, with the aim of classifying them under broad categories for the development of a framework showing the interrelationships among them.

A search was ran for selected keyword themes using three powerful and rigorous search engines: Scopus, Google Scholar and Science Direct, to identify relevant articles from 12 peer-reviewed journals. These were desk reviewed through manual filtering to select drivers of integration of ES into supplier selection.

Thirty-one drivers identified from 41 relevant articles as propelling integration of ES into supplier selection were then classified into five categories: strong policy direction, high level of commitment, desire for high reputation, robust technology and availability of green products. This yielded a framework showing the interconnectedness among the drivers.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge by developing a classification of drivers of integration of ES into supplier selection. The interconnectedness brought to the fore a more subtle appreciation of the drivers of green integration, which could help expand current knowledge outside the narrow scope of isolated drivers. This study provides detailed analyses of drivers of green integration into supplier selection.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of drivers of integrating green into supplier selection, which is lacking in the body of knowledge on ES.

Though there is literature on green collaboration to supplier selections, there are hardly any empirical studies that analyze collaborative networks toward green supplier selection (GSS) from the perspective of green relational capital (GRC). Therefore, this study aims to fill this research gap by analyzing the development of collaboration toward GSS through the lenses of GRC. Also, this study explores how collaboration between institutions and their relevant green stakeholders, framed through the lens of GRC influences the selection of green suppliers.

This study uses an exploratory case study approach involving public universities in Ghana. This study is based on interviews conducted with 27 key respondents across seven universities. A purposive sampling technique was used in selecting respondents who were interviewed face-to-face with a semi-structured interview guide. Atlas ti software was used to generate themes for discussion.

This study’s findings suggest that the reason green criteria are not integrated into supplier selection is due to an insufficient collaboration among relevant green stakeholders. Through green training workshops, conferences, continuous professional development and affiliation with professional bodies, procurement practitioners can develop a collaborative network among themselves to promote the integration of green sustainability into supplier selection. Constructs that help to establish strong collaborative network identified in this study include trust and consistency, mutual benefits, obvious intentions and effective communication.

This study identified constructs promoting effective green collaboration toward the adoption of GSS. These constructs as identified in this study, provide a clear means of developing green collaboration among relevant stakeholders. By fostering and developing collaboration, the main construct of GRC, institutions can successfully integrate green sustainability into their supplier selection process, leading to long-term benefits for both the environment and the institution.

Collaboration toward integration of green sustainability into supplier selection necessitates engagement with various relevant green stakeholders, including suppliers, customers, government bodies, colleagues in sister institutions and environmental advocacy groups. This fosters a sense of shared responsibility and collective action toward sustainability goals.

This study offers empirical evidence on the impact of collaboration on supplier selection and green sustainability performance, contributing to the existing body of literature. By analyzing collaboration, a perspective of GRC, toward the integration of green sustainability into supplier selection is considered as a novel study.

Given that the literature on the links between taxation and inclusive human development is ambiguous, it is important to investigate whether the mediating influence of governance in taxation for inclusive development exists. Thus, this study aims to explore the linkages between the governance quality, taxation and inclusive human development (i.e. inequality-adjusted human development index).

This study employs the generalized method of moments (GMM) technique to establish the empirical findings on 52 African countries for the period 2010–2018. Among the existing GMM approaches, this study follows the Roodman approach, an enhancement of the Arellano and Bover techniques, which limits the proliferation of instruments. This study uses the two-step approach, which deals with issues of the heteroscedasticity as against instead the one-step procedure, which solely addresses the homoscedasticity concerns.

The following findings are established. First, there is an unconditional positive effect of taxation on inclusive human development. Second, the net effects of taxation on inclusive human development, associated with the interaction of the government revenue with governance quality variables, are positive for the most part. It is then evident that when taxation policies are combined with good governance initiatives, the ultimate impact of inclusive human development is likely to be enhanced.

This study establishes that, whereas taxation dynamics largely have a favorable incidence in promoting inclusive human development, when such taxation measures are complemented with good governance initiatives, the overall impact of inclusive human development is also likely to be positive. It follows that policies designed to promote political, economic and institutional governance should be implemented in tandem, which policies designed to boost tax performance in the sampled countries. The findings can also be understood from the perspectives that inclusive human development is likely to be boosted when taxation measures are complemented with, (1) the free and fair election and replacement of political leaders (i.e. political governance), (2) the formulation and implementation of inclusive policies for the delivery of public goods (i.e. economic governance) and (3) the respect by citizens and the state of institutions that govern interactions between them (i.e. institutional governance).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful and promising technology that can foster the performance, and competitiveness of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). However, the adoption of AI among MSMEs is still low and slow, especially in developing countries like Jordan. This study aims to explore the elements that influence the intention to adopt AI among MSMEs in Jordan and examines the roles of firm innovativeness and government support within the context.

The study develops a conceptual framework based on the integration of the technology acceptance model, the resource-based view, the uncertainty reduction theory and the communication privacy management. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling – through AMOS and R studio – and the importance–performance map analysis techniques, the responses of 471 MSME founders were analyzed.

The findings reveal that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and facilitating conditions are significant drivers of AI adoption, while perceived risks act as a barrier. AI autonomy positively influences both firm innovativeness and AI adoption intention. Firm innovativeness mediates the relationship between AI autonomy and AI adoption intention, and government support moderates the relationship between facilitating conditions and AI adoption intention.

The findings provide valuable insights for policy formulation and strategy development aimed at promoting AI adoption among MSMEs. They highlight the need to address perceived risks and enhance facilitating conditions and underscore the potential of AI autonomy and firm innovativeness as drivers of AI adoption. The study also emphasizes the role of government support in fostering a conducive environment for AI adoption.

As in many emerging nations, the AI adoption research for MSMEs in Jordan (which constitute 99.5% of businesses), is under-researched. In addition, the study adds value to the entrepreneurship literature and integrates four theories to explore other significant factors such as firm innovativeness and AI autonomy.

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis on the economic relationship between trade openness and economic growth and to identify current developments, potential research area and future directions. The emphasis is on the identification of annual growth of publications, country-wise distribution, publication pattern, intellectual structure and cluster analysis of scientific production in this field.

This study used evaluative techniques, text mining approach and performance analysis to identify possible patterns and correlation and to measure the impact of authors/citations/scientific production. Further, this study used the bibliometric mapping to represent the structural features of scientific production. This study emphasized on identification of the research hotspots based on occurrence of indexed keywords, productive researchers and journals during 2000–2022. Further, cluster analysis is performed using VOS viewer to analyze the current dynamics and future direction of the association between trade openness and economic growth (Eck and Waltman, 2011). Also, co-citation analysis is used in this study to identify the relations among authors or journals or documents using citation data, whereas the bibliographic coupling/mapping is intended to analyze the citing documents. Similarly, co-word analysis is used to study the article keywords that are mainly used to assess the conceptual structure of a concerning subject.

Economic growth is a function of trade openness, and it is important to analyze the relationship between trade openness and economic growth. Trade openness tends to become more liberalized over time, to contribute more to economic growth. Empirical evidence suggested that there exists a strong association between trade openness and economic growth. Further, keyword timeline analysis illustrated that the linkage between trade openness and economic growth is current area of interest among researchers. As per bibliometric analysis, China, Pakistan and Malaysia are the three most prolific countries in the terms of published articles on this theme. However, the most influential publications based on h-index and citation on trade openness–economic growth relationship is produced by Turkey. Based on cluster analysis, this study suggests that researchers are currently working on trade openness–economic growth relationship with other variables such as FDI, financial development, labor force, environment degradation and carbon emission, while in future, researchers could work on variables such as technology and sustainable development.

There are some limitations of this study. The first limitation is the authors have used Scopus database, leaving the possibility for future research to use Web of Science, Google Scholar or other similar sources. The second limitation is that the authors have used search terms “trade openness “and “economic growth,” although research could be performed using synonyms or even relevant terms in other languages.

Cluster analysis suggested that researchers are currently working on trade openness–economic growth relationship with other variables such as FDI, financial development, labor force, environment degradation and carbon emission, while in future, researchers could work on variables such as technology and sustainable development. Therefore, this study identified the potential research area in this research domain.

To confirm the originality of this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to combine bibliometric analysis and cluster analysis on trade openness–economic growth relationship. This study makes a comparison with phenomena/processes/events in contemporary economic and social reality in the field of trade openness and economic growth relationship.