Fiscal inputs, internal control systems, and minimum service standard achievement in Indonesian provinces

Since the beginning of the administrative and territorial reform in Ukraine, the financial decentralization process has been intensified. It aims at optimizing the budgetary resource redistribution in order to make communities financially independent. This significantly increases the financial capacity for self-organization and self-development of a united territorial community, which determines the need to apply valuation methods to increase the territory’s investment attractiveness.
The article outlines the peculiarities of the united territorial communities (UTCs) management under fiscal decentralization, taking into account the need to apply current methods of value-oriented management. At the same time, the use of SWOT analysis as one of the methods of value-oriented management made it possible to evaluate the efficiency and attractiveness of UTCs under decentralization. The financial activity of 665 UTCs was analyzed and the model for managing the united territorial community was created. It is emphasized that the modern understanding of financial support for united territorial communities remains unresolved today, and the expediency to introduce changes in the UTC, which envisage using the subsidiarity principles, is not justified.
The key directions for managing the UTCs are identified. This refers to communities that began their activities and already faced the first challenges: management of available resources, provision of needs and sustainable development of the community, changes in the ratio of their income and expenditure components, increase in the budget income per capita.
It is recommended to focus on tools of value-oriented management in the united territorial communities in order to attract investors and increase the financial capacity of local authorities.

Companies and investors in emerging markets have started paying attention to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) issues. There has been a growing demand for aligning ESG disclosure of companies to UN SDGs (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals), so understanding how the firm-level ESG affects the country-level SDG is very important for evaluating the advances in ESG and SDG implementation in emerging markets. This study examines the linkage between firm-level ESG disclosures and their relationship with country-level SDG scores over ten years for three emerging countries: India, China, and Brazil. The analysis of 1,500 top-listed firms in these countries reveals an increasing trend of firms going for ESG disclosures and increased ESG scores over the years in the three markets. Out of the total sample, almost 75% of firms make ESG disclosures in Brazil, followed by 54% in India and 32% in China. Additionally, companies in all these countries tend to emphasize governance-related disclosures more, with Brazil having higher ESG disclosures than India and China. The correlation and causality tests indicate a significant positive correlation between mean ESG scores and country-specific SDG scores. The Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel causality tests provide stronger linkages between firm-specific Environment scores and SDG scores, indicating that a firm’s environment disclosures translate into higher SDG scores. However, the same is not valid for Social and Governance factors. These findings have important implications given the global attention on the linkages between ESG disclosure and SDG score.

Acknowledgments
The financial and infrastructure support provided by FORE School of Management, New Delhi in completing this paper is gratefully acknowledged.

This study applied Altman Z-score model to assess the bankruptcy risk of a set of multidisciplinary enterprises of various types, mainly small and medium enterprises, with data taken from official financial reports of 180 enterprises in Soc Trang province. The binary logistic regression was employed to assess the impact of non-financial and financial factors on the bankruptcy risk of enterprises. The research findings showed that both the non-financial factors such as business area, types and size of the business, the educational level of managers and executors and other characteristics, and the financial factors (indicators) such as earnings before tax, net profit/equity ratio, earnings before interest and tax/total assets ratio, equity/total debt ratio, affect the bankruptcy risk of enterprises. Predicting the bankruptcy risk and measuring its determinants play an important role not only as an effective managing tool of the business, but also as evidence for policymakers to support the sustainable development of business.