Mohamed Fawzy Mohamed Elsayed

This study examines the impact of economic diversification and oil rent on economic growth in Saudi Arabia over the period 1980–2024. To analyze both short-term and long-term relationships, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach is employed. The results are further validated using Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) estimators to ensure robustness. The findings indicate that economic diversification has a significant and positive effect on long-term economic growth. In addition, oil rent, population, and gross fixed capital formation also contribute positively and significantly to long-term development, consistent with theoretical expectations. In contrast, inflation does not have a statistically significant effect. Overall, these results highlight the important role of economic diversification in supporting Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and demonstrate the country’s progress toward achieving this strategic goal.

The joint influence of digital adoption in corporate governance and its impact on external assurance is a critical and emerging nexus in the literature concerning auditing and technological innovation, especially in volatile markets. Building on agency theory and resource dependence theory, this study investigates the nexus between corporate digital transformation (DT) and audit quality (AQ), while examining the moderating role of AC characteristics—specifically size, gender diversity, expertise, and activity—within the Egyptian context. Utilizing a sample of 120 non-financial firms listed on the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) from 2022 to 2024 (360 firm-year observations), the analysis employs Robust Least Squares (M-estimation) and Panel EGLS to ensure resilience against outliers and heteroscedasticity. The empirical findings provide robust evidence that digital transformation significantly enhances audit quality by constraining discretionary accruals, supporting the premise that technological integration improves monitoring and transparency. Moreover, the results reveal that the audit committee acts as a pivotal positive moderator, strengthening the digitalization-audit quality relationship; this impact is most pronounced in firms with larger, more gender-diverse, and financially expert audit committees. While audit committee activity shows a reactive correlation with accruals, its interaction remains essential for continuous monitoring in digital environments. Ultimately, this study offers novel insights for regulators and firms in emerging economies, highlighting that the benefits of technological adoption in financial reporting are maximized only when complemented by robust internal governance mechanisms, necessitating simultaneous investment in digital infrastructure and the fortification of audit committee attributes to ensure sustained audit market efficiency.

This study investigates the moderating role of board gender diversity in the relationship between tax avoidance and corporate cash holdings in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), an emerging market in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of nonfinancial firms listed in KSA over the period 2020–2023. Fixed-effects regression models are employed to examine the proposed relationships, and robustness checks are conducted using alternative measures of cash holdings and lagged independent variables to mitigate endogeneity concerns. The results reveal a significant positive association between tax avoidance and corporate cash holdings, indicating that firms engaging in greater tax avoidance strategies tend to accumulate higher cash balances. Furthermore, board gender diversity is found to strengthen this relationship, suggesting that gender-diverse boards play an active role in influencing financial decision-making related to tax-driven cash retention.

Our study explores how ESG performance affects corporate misconduct (CM) in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) firms and whether having more women on corporate boards influences this relationship. Using logistic regression and using data collected from GCC firms, we analyse the moderating effect of board gender diversity (BGD) on the relationship between ESG and CM. Our findings show that strong ESG performance reduces CM, and greater BGD further decreases misconduct. Moreover, gender-diverse boards strengthen the link between ESG and lower CM rates. This study contributes to the literature by examining how BGD influences the ESG-CM relationship in the GCC region. The current findings are valuable for investors, businesses, and policymakers. Investors should prioritize companies with strong ESG practices and diverse boards to minimize the risks they might face. Businesses should integrate female directors on boards to enhance ethical practices. Policymakers can promote corporate responsibility by incentivizing gender diversity and ESG adoption, which is crucial for a more transparent and accountable business environment.