During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have reduced the frequency of going out, and need to engage in health behaviors at home. Home-based exercise has aroused people’s attention. This paper aims to examine the influencing mechanism of health consciousness on home-based exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic. A questionnaire method was used to select 449 Chinese respondents on an online platform; the questionnaire includes a health consciousness scale, health life goal scale, perceived behavioral control scale, and the home-based exercise scale. A T-test was used to conduct differential analysis. The hierarchical regression analysis method was used to examine the relationship between health consciousness and home-based exercise, and the Hayes’ SPSS PROCESS macro was used to test mediating effect. The results show that there are significant differences in home-based exercise with respect to gender, age, and marital status. Health consciousness has a significant positive effect on home-based exercise. Perceived behavioral control acts as the mediator between health consciousness and home-based exercise. Health consciousness can influence home-based exercise through health life goals and perceived behavioral control in turn. This paper takes a home-based exercise survey, and expands the theoretical research of home-based exercise. The findings suggest that people should pay attention to promoting the transformation of health consciousness into home-based exercise. It provides enlightenment for people to adopt health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More countries and regions are joining the bandwagon of smart city construction, which is an important strategy and innovative urban governance concept to solve the problem of rapid urbanization. This paper examines whether smart city innovation is able to ameliorate the traffic congestion faced by a large number of cities. Using panel data for 187 prefecture-level cities in China from 2008 to 2017, this paper tests the effect of implementation of a smart city on urban traffic congestion with the difference-in-difference method. The results show that, firstly, the construction of smart cities have significantly reduced the degree of urban traffic congestion and improved the quality and capacity of public transport. Secondly, information technology and urban innovation are the main mechanisms for smart city implementation to improve urban traffic problems. Thirdly, the improvement effect of smart city implementation on traffic management shows an increasing marginal effect over time. By overcoming the estimation bias in previous studies, this study accurately analyzes the positive role and dynamic effect of smart city construction on traffic improvement. It augments the literature of program evaluation and assessment of smart city implementation. By examining how to improve traffic congestion, it offers some insights that could inspire governments to build smarter cities with better traffic.

The public sector continues to be under intense pressure to improve its innovation performance. Consequently, stakeholders are calling for more empirical studies on the antecedents of innovation, especially from a developing country’s perspective. Motivated by this call, we investigate the impact of institutional creativity and institutional innovation capacity on public innovation performance in the context of Ghana. Key to our model is that, institutional creativity and institutional innovation capacity are also enabled by inter-agency collaborations, institutional leadership, and stakeholder pressure. The partial least squares structural equation model is employed to estimate the survey responses of 195 respondents from fifty public sector institutions. The empirical analysis confirms that organizational creativity has a positive and significant impact on innovation performance, innovation capacity has a negative and insignificant impact on innovation performance, and inter-agency collaboration and institutional leadership contribute positively to institutional creativity and innovation capacity. However, stakeholder pressure negatively impacts both institutional creativity and innovation performance. This study contributes to knowledge on the antecedents of public innovation performance from a developing country’s perspective. It also advances theories on public innovation performance.

This study primarily focused on the behavioral modifications among employees while keeping the contextual factors that enable them to strive for sustainable environmental performance in view. The aim of this research was to uncover the impact of GHRM practices on intrinsic motivation (IM), harmonious work passion (HWP), and sustainable environmental performance (SEP) in small and medium enterprises in Uzbekistan. Moreover, this study mainly investigated intrinsic motivation and harmonious work passion as potential mediators in the relationship between GHRM practices and sustainable environmental performance. Additionally, this study included green mindfulness as a moderator in the association between GHRM practices and mediators (i.e., intrinsic motivation and harmonious work passion). In total, 345 Uzbekistan employees from small and medium enterprises completed a survey. This study deployed the path-analytical approach by using Mplus 8.0. Our findings demonstrate that GHRM practices are positively associated with IM, HWP, and SEP. In addition, this research confirms that intrinsic motivation significantly mediates the relationship between GHRM practices and SEP. Consequently, harmonious work passion also significantly mediates the association between GHRM practices and SEP. Furthermore, this study shows that a high level of green mindfulness strengthens the direct effect of GHRM on IM and HWP, along with the indirect effect of GHRM practices on sustainable environmental performance. Indeed, investigating the associations among study variables via moderated mediation mechanisms remarkably contributes to the extant literature.

The adoption of e-government promises efficiency in the delivery of government services to citizens across various sectors of the economy. Due to this, most Global North countries have advanced in the deployment of e-government for improving public-service delivery. Unfortunately, most African countries, including Ghana, are still lagging in e-government development. This study examined e-government development across African Union member states. It explored the role of e-government in the reform of public administration and governance, focusing on Ghana as a case study. Using a mixed-method approach, the study analyzed secondary data of key e-government indicators using the TOPSIS method. This helped underscore the transformative impact on public administration and governance by using primary data via interviews. The results show advanced progress in some African countries, including Ghana, due to aligned digital strategies with national policies. Also, technology integration is evident in Ghana’s public sector and is reshaping public administration and governance. The study recommends that to achieve the long-term sustainability of these advancements, interagency collaboration and data-sharing mechanisms between the public and private sectors should be strengthened, while all forms of silos should be broken to promote the delivery of services. This study enhances public-service delivery by identifying areas needing both improvement and allocation of resources for shaping e-government policy development.

Corruption in public procurement remains a challenge to good governance, especially in developing nations. Blockchain technology has been espoused as a new paradigm for achieving sustainable public procurement practices for effective service delivery and, by extension, promoting sustainable development. Given the potential of blockchain technology, its implementation has been slow in developing countries. Additionally, there is an inadequate decision support framework to prioritize corruption-prone stages of the public procurement cycle for strategic blockchain integration at the most critical corruption-prone stages of the public procurement cycle given the scarce resources available in developing countries. Therefore, we employed a matured theory that is the principal-agent theory to identify key agency problems related to public procurement in developing countries. An interview with 25 experts and a thorough review of Ghana’s Auditor General produced seven public procurement cycle stages. Further, a survey was designed for experts and stakeholders to prioritize the identified procurement stages under the agency problems through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Our results revealed that tender evaluation was the most critical stage susceptible to corruption, followed by contract management and procurement planning in the public procurement stages. Additionally, for the relative importance of the criteria, information asymmetry was ranked first, followed by moral hazard, and then adverse selection. This study offers a targeted framework for blockchain deployment in public procurement from an African country perspective. The outcome of this study provides insights for policymakers and procurement practitioners to know the most critical stages of public procurement stages and leverage blockchain technology given the scarcity of resources in developing countries to aid sustainable public procurement. The proposed blockchain framework can enhance service delivery, citizens’ trust, and international donor confidence in partnership and funding for public procurement projects in developing countries.