Sustainability has become a pivotal concern for organizations and politicians worldwide, leading to accelerating focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) within this context. This study aims to delineate a structural network map of the fundamental relationship between the concepts of ERP and sustainability, their evolutionary dynamics, and future research trends as revealed in the international literature. To this end, articles relevant to the subjects were downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database. After meticulous data cleaning, a bibliometric analysis of 2,035 articles was performed using the VOSviewer software. Keyword network analysis revealed 122 unique links, a Total Link Strength (TLS) of 2,485, and 9 distinct thematic clusters, indicating a highly integrated topology. The examination of the network map empirically showed that the concept of sustainability was the largest cluster, followed by the ERP system. Besides, the study discovered that the concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Stakeholder Engagement, and Environmental Policy were the most prominent keywords. Taking into account of geographical locations, the USA ranked first with 16,439 citations. Trend studies revealed a shift towards high-technology focused research in areas such as AI, cloud-based ERP systems, information systems, circular economy, and strategic decision making. Based on these findings, the study offered researchers a roadmap to access resources more easily and effectively so as to further their ERP and sustainability studies in the digital environment.

In order to alleviate environmental problems, China has formulated the environmental protection tax law. However, how does its implementation affect the financial performance of enterprises? This paper selects A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2024 as the research sample from the massive data of China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) database, and empirically studies the relationship between the implementation of environmental protection tax policies and corporate financial performance by using difference-in-differences big data analysis technology. The study found that the implementation of the environmental protection tax law policy is positively correlated with the financial performance of enterprises, and after a variety of data visualization robustness tests, the conclusion is still valid. Through the analysis of big data mechanism, we found that technological innovation and agency costs play a certain mediating effect between the two. In order to ensure the implementation of environmental protection tax, it is suggested to build a cross sectoral risk warning mechanism based on data sharing, and rely on the dynamic tax preference model to realize “the less pollution, the more preferential”, so as to stimulate the green innovation power of enterprises.

Across the international audit and public governance literature, the OECD and the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) increasingly framed internal audit as a risk-based and continuous assurance function rather than a retrospective and compliance-checking exercise. In small-state local government systems such as Malta’s, however, this shift has not yet been matched by a comparable institutional transformation. This study examined the institutional position of the internal audit function in Maltese local governments within the framework of public financial management, internal control, risk management, and accountability, and then developed an internal audit model applicable to Malta’s administrative scale. A directed qualitative content analysis was adopted to examine official institutional documents, informed theoretically by agency theory and institutional theory, and combined with comparative institutional analysis. Documents were coded against eight core criteria, including institutional independence, risk-based audit capacity, and follow up of the findings, when applied uniformly to Malta and five comparator countries (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Estonia, and Ireland), plus four supplementary criteria used only for the Malta case. The findings demonstrated that Malta’s core institutional weakness was not the absence of audit mechanisms, but insufficient integration of external audit, compliance review, internal control, and corrective action into a continuous internal audit cycle. The comparative analysis indicated that a centrally coordinated, locally connected, and risk-based hybrid model was more applicable to Malta than separate per-council internal audit units. The original contribution of the study lies in systematically linking National Audit Office Malta (NAO)’s recurring local-government findings to a structured and criterion-based comparison across five European models, thus translating this into an institutional design calibrated to Malta’s scale, and extending agency and institutional-isomorphism theory to small-state local government audit.