Issue #2 (Volume 14 2025)

Since the reform era, Indonesia has experienced three stages of fiscal decentralization. In the third stage, the focus of the policy shifted to village development by giving authority to manage village funds. However, due to a lack of supervision and inefficient governance, this policy has not been able to improve the quality of rural development. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the level of efficiency of village fund use and analyze the variables that influence it. This study employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) to determine the level of efficiency and binary logistic regression to determine the variables that influence it in 2018 and 2021. The results show an increase in the number of provinces experiencing efficiency in managing village funds. In 2018, 10 provinces (30.30%) were declared efficient, but the remaining 23 (69.70%) were declared inefficient. In 2021, the number of provinces declared efficient increased to 14 (42.42%), while 19 (57.58%) were still considered inefficient. This finding signals that the level of village fund efficiency in Indonesia is still a major challenge toward increasing rural economic growth. The variable that significantly affects the level of efficiency is the level of education of the village head. The lack of human resources who have expertise in village fund management has resulted in low-quality implementation of village development and community empowerment programs.

Digital transformation in village financial management has become a strategic issue in modern governance, but research on digital transformation is still limited and not well systematic. This study aims to analyze the evolution and development of digital transformation research in village financial management through systematic bibliometric analysis from 2015 to 2024. The paper uses bibliometric analysis of 507 documents from journals in the Scopus database processed using RStudio software with the biblioshiny package. The research findings reveal gaps in theoretical development, especially in the integration of local governance frameworks with digital innovation models. The research landscape shows a growing focus on accountability mechanisms (28 articles) and transparency systems (24 articles) but lacks comprehensive studies on implementation challenges and success factors. Although local governance has emerged as a dominant research stream (89 articles), there is still less attention to critical areas such as digital literacy, cybersecurity, and change management in the rural context. The analysis identifies three future research directions: the need for a specific digital transformation framework for village-level financial systems, mechanisms for integrating traditional governance with digital innovation, and evaluation metrics for the success of digital transformation in rural settings. These findings contribute to the development of theoretical understanding and practical implementation of digital transformation in village financial management.