How critical is SME financial literacy and digital financial access for financial and economic development in the expanded BRICS block?

Introduction: The expanded BRICS block presents significant opportunities for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), but challenges related to financial literacy and digital access hinder their potential. While global efforts emphasize financial literacy and digitization as key drivers of economic growth, especially in developing regions, their specific impact on SMEs in the BRICS block remains underexplored. This paper contributes to the literature by contextualizing how financial literacy and digital financial access influence SME sustainability and economic progress, particularly in light of ongoing efforts to bridge the digital divide.

How does digitally enabled micro-finance promote income equality for the vulnerable in the expanded BRICS block during the pandemic?

Introduction: Tech-enabled alternative micro-finance promotes income equality in growing BRICS and Austria across financial crises and pandemics. Are financial access and digital skills equally economically valuable? Our study uses inputs: Human Capital, Alternative Micro-finance, Digitization, Governance, and Entrepreneurship, GDP, inflation, population growth, pandemics, and economic crises using the global 2000-2022 to explain income equality using SWIID Gini disposable and market income index as outputs.

Methods: The study uses Principal component analysis for reducing data dimensionality and collinearity.

Formulation of a corporate governance index for banking sector: The GIB.X62.

The purpose of this research is to define a new international corporate governance index for the banking sector (GIB.X62) based on 62 criteria and 7 internal performance indicators related to board of directors, internal audit, compensation, risk management, nomination, compliance, ethics, transparency and disclosure. The new index model was applied on 7 different banks from US, France, Spain, Italy, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan in 2021.

Exploring global retailers' corporate social responsibility performance.

Retailers serve as the main interface between business and society. This study explores the Corporate Social Responsibility priorities and performance of the largest 23 global retailers. This set of global retailers, who have a major impact on society, were studied in terms of social, environmental and sustainability practices and strategy, and there performance was analysed and evaluated.