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Access to and usage of smartphones for agricultural purposes amongst small-scale farmers in rural areas of developing countries is still limited. Smartphones may provide an opportunity to develop farmers’ capacities with specific applications offering fast access to continually updated and reliable information. This study develops a framework to investigate the cognitive and affective behavioural drivers of smallholder farmers´ intention to use a smartphone in a developing country context. For this, survey data was collected from 664 randomly selected small-scale farmers in Bihar State, India in 2016. The analysis included a partial least square estimation of the behavioural model. The results confirm positive influences on the intention to use a smartphone for agricultural purposes through subjective norms, attitude, self-control, as well as positive and negative anticipated emotions. There is no evidence that negative anticipated emotions related to failure outweighed other factors. These results extend the academic literature with new conceptual insights and provide application-oriented implications for stakeholders, such as NGOs, extension services and research institutes.

The study conducts a country-level examination of the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on sustainable development. Sustainable development is an agenda that global countries are determined to achieve. The ubiquitous nature of ICT and the benefits it accrues make it an inevitable choice to address the sustainable development agenda of nations. The literature on the influence of ICT on sustainable development at a global level is scant and the available literature provides ambiguous results on the relationship. This study conceptualizes sustainable development as three dimensions—economic, social and environment and supports the contention using secondary panel data analysis. A dataset comprises of 80 countries during the years 2000–2016. A Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation method helps in understanding the simultaneous relationship of ICT with the three described dimensions. To explore the relationship further, mediation analysis was conducted to understand the relationship of ICT with each dimension of sustainable development in the presence of the other dimensions. The results indicate that ICT has a significant positive influence on the dimensions of sustainable development of a nation. However, further examination with the mediation analysis reveals that ICT has a strong influence on the economic dimension and the spillover effects from economic dimension result in the realization of environmental and societal dimension of sustainable development. The results indicate that the unprecedented diffusion of ICT across remotest countries of the world is a ray of hope to address the agenda of sustainable development. However, the utmost attention must be taken to balance the three dimensions of sustainable development. The policy makers need to keep a critical eye on the environmental dimension and develop policies that incentivize the use of environmentally friendly technologies to ensure minimal or no impact on the environment and thereby ensure ICT as a catalyst for sustainable development.

This study conducts a randomised control trial to offer a technical workshop and examine whether providing information about the full range of services on the mobile money platform would increase mobile money usage, by taking a case of the Ashanti Region, Ghana. We find a significant positive impact of mobile money education on the recent usage of mobile money for transactions. However, no significant evidence of the workshop was found on new mobile money account ownership, or on the share of transactions transmitted through mobile money. Furthermore, weak and volatile outcomes were observed as impacts on remittances after the interventions. We discuss potential reasons behind the weak effects found.

This article reviews how Chinese scholars debate the policy of building smart courts in the context of judicial reform. This policy entails the automation and digitisation of judicial processes. It is part of broader judicial reforms that aim to create a more accurate and consistent judiciary. The article identifies four reform concepts that guide the debate: efficiency, consistency, transparency and supervision, and judicial fairness. This review is a meta-synthesis, using practices of narrative and systematic literature reviews, focusing on evaluating and interpreting the Chinese scholarship and reform concepts. It reviews how Chinese scholars discuss the implications of judicial automation and digitisation. Additionally, it analyses the normative concepts behind the reform goals within China’s political-legal context. The analysis finds that the generally positive evaluation in the debate can be explained by an instrumentalist understanding of the reform concepts and the political purpose of courts in the Chinese political-legal context.

Digital platforms play an increasing role across socio-economic sectors in developing countries yet development research to date on this topic has been limited and under-conceptualised. To help facilitate such research in future, this paper presents and applies the “multi-level perspective” as a framework to understand platforms in development as socio-technical transitions. Analysing a successful ride-hailing platform—EasyTaxi in Colombia—it finds what was originally a niche innovation then effected a socio-technical transition within Bogotá’s taxi regime. Although there are some issues in applying the framework, it is found to have a factoral, scalar and longitudinal holism that were lacking in existing conceptualisations within the literature on platforms and developing countries. The multi-level perspective offers insights into the process of innovation, rapidity of scaling, and development impacts relating to resource endowments, institutional formalisation, and shifts in power. The framework may therefore be a useful lens for development researchers seeking to better understand digital platforms.

Existing literature has examined either the key drivers of global value chain (GVC) exports or the factors affecting e-commerce growth. Studies that investigate the impact of e-commerce, in particular business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, on GVCs are largely missing. The growing prevalence of digital platforms centered around e-commerce marketplaces motivates this study to examine if e-commerce growth in an economy can affect its GVC exports and how information and communication technology infrastructure and technology adoption measures, payment systems, and delivery mechanisms can facilitate this growth. Panel ordinary least squares, feasible generalized least squares, and two-stage least squares estimations are used to determine the relationship between GVC exports and e-commerce sales. The results indicate empirical evidence of the positive impact of B2C e-commerce on GVC exports. The robust and positive impact of B2C e-commerce on GVC exports—when instrumented by secure internet servers, internet bandwidth, and digital payment schemes—suggests growth of B2C e-commerce in an economy can contribute to its GVC participation.

This study aims to investigate womenʼs participation in offline and online marketplaces and identify related factors, particularly the digital divide, access to the internet, and the level of information and communications technology (ICT) proficiency. It discusses the empirical methodology of its two approaches: a descriptive analysis of statistical data and a sociological survey. This study employs quantitative analyses. The respondents to this study were women who used marketplaces in Kazakhstan. The model was tested using the data for 295 respondents. The results reveal the COVID-19 pandemic affected both the number of online purchases and the structure of those purchases: women began ordering more medicines and food, and less equipment and clothing online. The main factors affecting participation in online marketplaces are income level, access to the internet, and the use of ICT. This study tries to reduce the gap in the literature on the benefits and barriers for women by providing empirical evidence about the influence of COVID-19 on online marketplaces.

Where does the nation-state end and globalization begin? InTerritory, Authority, Rights, one of the world's leading authorities on globalization shows how the national state made today's global era possible. Saskia Sassen argues that even while globalization is best understood as \"denationalization,\" it continues to be shaped, channeled, and enabled by institutions and networks originally developed with nations in mind, such as the rule of law and respect for private authority. This process of state making produced some of the capabilities enabling the global era. The difference is that these capabilities have become part of new organizing logics: actors other than nation-states deploy them for new purposes. Sassen builds her case by examining how three components of any society in any age--territory, authority, and rights--have changed in themselves and in their interrelationships across three major historical \"assemblages\": the medieval, the national, and the global. The book consists of three parts. The first, \"Assembling the National,\" traces the emergence of territoriality in the Middle Ages and considers monarchical divinity as a precursor to sovereign secular authority. The second part, \"Disassembling the National,\" analyzes economic, legal, technological, and political conditions and projects that are shaping new organizing logics. The third part, \"Assemblages of a Global Digital Age,\" examines particular intersections of the new digital technologies with territory, authority, and rights. Sweeping in scope, rich in detail, and highly readable,Territory, Authority, Rightsis a definitive new statement on globalization that will resonate throughout the social sciences.

In 2019, the United States' trade war with China expanded to blacklist the Chinese tech titan Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. The resulting attention showed the information and communications technology (ICT) firm entwined with China's political-economic transformation. But the question remained: why does Huawei matter? Yun Wen uses the Huawei story as a microcosm to understand China's evolving digital economy and the global rise of the nation's corporate power. Rejecting the idea of the transnational corporation as a static institution, she explains Huawei's formation and restructuring as a historical process replete with contradictions and complex consequences. She places Huawei within the international political economic framework to capture the dynamics of power structure and social relations underlying corporate China's globalization. As she explores the contradictions of Huawei's development, she also shows the ICT firm's complicated interactions with other political-economic forces. Comprehensive and timely, The Huawei Model offers an essential analysis of China's dynamic development of digital economy and the global technology powerhouse at its core.

Income-generating activities by women are an effective means of reducing gender-based deprivation and disparities. In the constrained familial and community settings of developing economies, online platforms can be an appropriate means for women to carry out economic activities. In this context, important initiatives taken by the Government of India, such as the Common Service Centres scheme, are worth studying. This paper critically evaluates such revolutionary online platform- based entrepreneurial initiatives using the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen. We examine through case studies how women-run businesses use online platforms and what determines their success, inputs, capabilities, and conversion factors. Further, national enterprise-level data from Indiaʼs National Sample Survey Office are analysed to show that states with a higher level of gender inequality are also the regions with a lower level of information and communications technology usage by women-run enterprises.