This study investigates the impact of corruption in public sector on carbon emissions in presence of energy use segregation, following the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) framework. The study has been carried out for Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) and Next 11 countries over the period of 1990-2017. Along with the finding of inverted N-shaped EKC for both the cases, we find that incidents of corruption enhance environmental degradation by reducing the positive impact of renewable energy consumption on environmental quality, and increasing the negative impact of fossil fuel consumption. This study has also divulged that the corruptive practices are more prone in case of the countries, where the development is mature and institutionalization is more stringent. Based on these findings, we suggest that environmental policies should take account of the corruption, and thereby, making the policies more robust and effective.

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With the increasing levels of digital transformation, focus on digital identities of individuals is increasingly getting prominence. It is the information captured as part of the identity surrounding the citizens which decides what services and products one is entitled to and can access. At present, there are still around 1.1 billion people in the world without any official identity. To address this concern, United Nations through its 16th Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recommended governments to provide their citizens with unique identities by 2030. India's Aadhaar is one significant step in this direction as it has already reached over 1 billion enrolments in India. However establishing a national digital identity program successfully requires expertise, time, and huge financial commitments. This paper takes Aadhaar as a case study and uses Design Theory (DT) and Critical Success Factor theory (CSF) as a theoretical lens and attempts to evaluate design and execution choices made during the tenure of the project. The study also identifies and prioritizes primary goals of Aadhaar based on the secondary data, expert opinion through a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and subsequently systematic prioritization using mixed research methodologies.The expert opinion from the FGD was analyzed using the Best-Worst method (BWM), followed by the Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) method and Matrix of Cross Impact Multiplications Applied to Classification (MICMAC) analysis. The study identified uniqueness, security and privacy as the top priority goals in an identity system and is 11 times more crucial than scalability which is identified to be of lesser priority. These findings from this study could be considered as a reference for other countries that aim to develop and implement digital identity for its citizens.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present such an analytical framework for analyzing Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs) and to do a comparative analysis of a set of GIFs using the analytical framework. Based on the comparative analysis, the paper presents a set of recommendations useful for new GIF initiatives.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on literature and personal knowledge and experience, an analytical framework is proposed for qualitative comparison of GIFs. The analytical framework is based on three core areas of interoperability frameworks – context, content, and process. A total of 21 GIFs are analyzed and evaluated against the framework. The primary sources of information for the study are the interoperability framework documents. In some cases, published articles, brochures, etc. are used as additional sources of information.FindingsThe comparative analysis shows that the analytical framework adequately covers all the features of the GIFs. Comparative analysis also shows that most of the GIFs concentrate mainly on technical and syntactical aspects only. Organizational and semantic issues are covered only by a handful of GIFs. At the policy level, most common interoperability policies are found to be: the universal adoption of common specifications used on the internet and world wide web, use of XML for data integration and data management, and use of open standards for all public sector information systems. Regarding management of GIF, it is found that German, Greek and New Zealand GIFs document the process of standards life cycle management in a much better way, whereas UK e‐GIFs' coverage of management and compliance mechanism of GIF is excellent. Overall, it is found that the UK e‐GIF is one of the most mature and exhaustive on all counts. German – Standards und Architekturen f¨r eGovernment‐Anwendungen on the other hand is found to be a unique effort. It incorporates features of both an enterprise architecture and those of an interoperability framework.Originality/valueThe contribution of the study is substantial for academia and practitioners. For academics, this framework can be used in future research as a tool to benchmark and grade GIFs. The practitioners, on the other hand, can use the study, to identify various essential features of a GIF which can be very useful for new GIF initiatives. The six‐layered e‐government technical architecture discussed here can be used to check the current status of technical interoperability in an organization and to identify gaps in the technology coverage.