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This study adopts an institutional entrepreneurship perspective in the context of public–private partnerships (P3s) to highlight the role of social actors in enacting institutional change in a complex organizational setting. By studying the actions of two prominent social actors, the authors argue that successful institutional change is the result of dynamic managerial activity supported by political clout, organizational authority and the social positioning of actors.

The authors conducted a field-based case study in a complex institutional and organizational setting in Alberta, Canada. The authors employed an institutional entrepreneurship perspective to identify and analyze the activities of two allied actors motivated to transform the institutional environment for public infrastructure delivery.

The empirical study suggests that the implementation of institutional change is both individualistic and collaborative. Moreover, it is grounded in everyday organizational practices and activities and involves a coalition of allies invested in enacting lasting change in organizational practice(s), even when maintaining the status quo seems advantageous.

The authors critique the structural explanations that dominate the literature on public–private partnership implementation, which downplays the role of agency and minimizes its interplay with institutional logics in effecting institutional change. Rather, the authors demonstrate that, given the observed impact of social actors, public–private partnership adoption and implementation can be theorized as a social phenomenon.

This study aims to investigate why anti-corruption statutes are not efficient in Nigeria’s upstream petroleum industry.

This study is a doctrinal legal research that embraces a point-by-point comparative methodology with a library research technique.

This study reveals that corruption strives on feeble implementation of anti-corruption legal regime and the absence of political will in offering efficient regulatory intervention. Finally, this study finds that anti-corruption organisations in Nigeria are not efficient due to non-existence of the Federal Government’s political will to fight corruption, insufficient funds and absence of stringent implementation of the anti-corruption legal regime in the country.

Investigations reveal during this study that Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) operations are characterised with poor record-keeping, lack of accountability as well as secrecy in the award of oil contracts, oil licence, leases and other financial transactions due to non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses contained in most of these contracts. Also, an arbitration proceeding limit access to their records and some of these agreements under contentions. This has also limited the success of this research work and generalising its findings.

This study recommends, among other reforms, soft law technique and stringent execution of anti-corruption statutes. This study also recommends increment in financial appropriation to Nigeria’s anti-corruption institutions, taking into consideration the finding that a meagre budget is a drawback.

This study reveals that corruption strives on feeble implementation of anti-corruption legal regime and the absence of political will in offering efficient regulatory intervention. Corruption flourishes due to poor enforcement of anti-corruption laws and the absence of political will in offering efficient regulatory intervention by the government.

The study advocates the need for enhancement of anti-corruption agencies' budgets taking into consideration the finding that meagres budgets are challenge of the agencies.

In this study, the authors revisit Alberta's public-private partnership (P3) program after 20 years of field level experience by retracing its historical emergence and institutional evolution given its political context. Specifically, the authors adopt a path dependence perspective to reconstruct and reexamine Alberta's P3 program emergence, reflect on the successes achieved, and articulate challenges that must be overcome to institutionalize P3s as part of Alberta's infrastructure delivery environment in the future.

Adopting a constructivist approach and a case-based methodology, the authors (re)analyze the activities of governmental agents, private industry, and other actors as part of a new infrastructure policy introduced in 2002 to transform the provincial institutional landscape to accommodate P3.

The authors find Alberta's P3 emergence was driven by the necessity of its infrastructure deficits, political expediency, and resource scarcity. Furthermore, with well-entrenched conservative political actors as gatekeepers, Alberta's P3 implementation demonstrated stability and incremental change simultaneously, consistent with core elements of path dependency. Following the introduction of P3 in Alberta, the province lacked formal institutional structures that would transition its P3 program from good to great and enable it to become firmly embedded in the public infrastructure delivery landscape. With the subsequent absence of P3-convinced (political) leadership and uncertainty about its P3 policy direction, Alberta was unable or unwilling to consolidate the progress made at the start of the program.

Most recently, the emergence of new political leadership in Alberta has (re)catalyzed policy progress, pointing toward a more methodical program approach, and suggesting a rediscovered confidence in P3s in the province with the establishment of a P3 Office (P3O), including nascent formal rules for unsolicited bids. These recent changes in our view make for a much more anchored policy and could lead to program sustainability and eventual institutionalization. Given the unpredictability of the recent political change, a more robust analysis of the relationship between political party control, leadership, and P3 stability is required to anticipate future policy and organizational obstacles.

Ethics is fundamentally a science of social and collective responsibility. Ethics concerns human behavior as responsible or accountable. Because of the nature of social interaction, certain members of the society will bear greater authority, and hence, greater individual and social responsibility than others. In our world, personal responsibility and social responsibility are hardly separable. Personal responsibility becomes responsibility for the world because the person and the world are inseparable. In this chapter, we use the term responsibility from a legal, ethical, moral, and spiritual (LEMS) standpoint as some promise, commitment, obligation, sanctioned by self, morals, law, or society, to do good, and if harm results, to repair harm done on another. Hence, responsibility from a moral perspective is trustworthiness and dependability of the agent in some enterprise. Its inverse is exoneration – the extent to which one is excused from commitment and repairing the harm done to others by one’s actions. We apply the theories and constructs of executive responsibility to two contemporary cases: (1) India’s Super Rich in 2014 and (2) the Fall and Rise of Starbucks. After exploring the basic notion of responsibility, we present a discussion on the nature and obligation of corporate responsibility into three parts: Part I: Classical Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility; Part II: Contemporary Understanding and Discussion on Corporate Responsibility, and Part III: A synthesis of classical and contemporary views of responsibility and their applications to corporate executive responsibility.

The objective of this study is to analyze the role that budgetary analytical capacity (BAC) plays for fiscal discipline in a sample of Eurozone countries in the postcrisis period.

Building on the policy capacity literature, an index for the BAC is constructed by including OECD budgetary data from three dimensions: reliability of projections, openness to legislative scrutiny and transparency. The proposed BAC index is validated by checking that larger values of the index are associated with the higher fiscal discipline scores across countries.

Controlling for the economic cycle, BAC index is positively associated with fiscal discipline. The association is stronger for the index as a whole than for the three separate dimensions.

The study is done on the limited sample of countries, and it is not feasible to validate results over time.

Budgetary policymakers can improve fiscal discipline by enhancing the three pillars that support the BAC.

Stronger BAC can help to improve the quality of public decision-making and overcome political opportunism.

This is the first study that introduces the concept of BAC, makes it operational and suggests its relevance for supporting fiscal discipline.

This study examines whether and how government fiscal pressure influences corporate charitable giving (CCG).

The authors exploit sub-national tax revenue sharing changes as exogenous variations to government’s fiscal pressure at the city level and then construct a quasi difference-in-differences (DiD) model to conduct the analysis based on a sample that consists of 14,168 firm-year observations in China during the period of 2003 to 2012.

The authors found that firms increase charitable donations when local governments face higher fiscal pressure. Such effects are more pronounced for firms that have stronger demand for political connectedness in the sample period. Furthermore, this study’s findings suggest that the timing strategy of donating helps firms to lower the effective tax rate and to build stronger political connections. In addition, donating firms outperform non-donating firms in terms of bank loan access and market reputation.

The authors contribute to at least three lines of literature: first, extend the understanding of timing strategies of corporate charitable behaviors; second, contribute to the literature studying the “crowd out” effect between government-provided charitable funds and private donations; finally, contribute to the emerging literature exploring the financial interests associated with corporate donation strategy (Claessens et al., 2008; Cull et al., 2015).

This paper aims to determine whether local governments (LGs) use non-consolidated municipally owned companies (MOCs), excluded from public sector entities and, consequently, from sub-national debt to avoid fiscal debt limits. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units.

This paper uses difference-in-differences and the system general method of moments model with the Blundell–Bond estimator for dynamic panel data analysis of MOCs owned by 866 Polish municipalities in 2010–2018.

This paper shows that the MOCs’ revenues support limited local public debt capacity by indebtedness restrictions imposed on municipalities in 2014. As a result, less indebted municipalities have higher off-budget revenues. The tightening of fiscal rules related to sub-sovereign indebtedness increased off-budget activities, but that effect is much stronger in rural and rural–urban municipalities than in urban municipalities and big cities.

This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units. In this paper, the authors combine theories relating to private and public finance; this is a novel approach and one that is also necessary – as, in fact, the worlds of public and private actors intersect – as exemplified by the existence of MOC.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how local government bodies in Nepal are empowered to play their constitutional roles and engage in activities to deliver public services at the doorsteps of the people effectively. The focus is on the institutionalisation of federalism, its implications for local governance, and capacity development of local authorities.

Ideas of decentralisation, governance and public management have been used to interpret findings based on qualitative research methods by key informant interviews, focus group discussions and personal observations conducted in five selected municipalities in Nepal.

The process of operationalising the power of local government bodies is more conventional and hierarchic. At the same time, the formulation and implementation of inclusive plans and budgeting are confined with certain formalities that do not necessarily allow citizens the space for voices. Federal government grants constrain fiscal jurisdiction and control over resource mobilisation. The mere preparation and administration of local government legislation and relevant by-laws have weakened the capacity of local government bodies.

From interpretation of first-hand data, this paper has identified the pitfalls of the federalisation process, the constraints deter the devolution of power to local bodies as well as the transformation of local governments into autonomous institutions in Nepal.

This study aims to examine the impact of fiscal deficit, exchange rate and trade openness on current account deficit (CAD). The study tried to empirically investigate the ‘twin deficits hypothesis’ and ‘compensation hypothesis’ in the Indian context.

Autoregressive distributed lagARDL) bound test approach was used by taking annual time series data from 1978 to 2021. The estimates confirm a significant long-run and short-run relationship between dependent variables, i.e. CAD and independent variables such as the fiscal deficit, exchange rate and trade openness.

The results show that positive shocks of all explanatory variables significantly affect the CAD. CAD and fiscal deficit are significantly associated, as the coefficient of fiscal deficit is positive and significant. The study also found that exchange rate and trade openness significantly affect the CAD. The coefficients of exchange rate and trade openness are positive and significant. The findings show that an increase in CADs results from liberal trade policies that help domestic industries grow their trade and expansionary fiscal policy, leading to a higher fiscal deficit. The negative and significant error correction term suggests that short-run disequilibrium converges to long-run equilibrium at a speed of 19.2%. The findings validate the ‘twin deficits hypothesis’ and ‘compensation hypothesis’ in the Indian context.

It can be inferred from the study that liberal policy to promote economic growth and trade openness should be designed and promoted judiciously. An excessive liberalised approach may impact other macroeconomic variables such as current account balances. Integrating the domestic market with global markets poses a big challenge for countries like India that aspire to penetrate global markets. Furthermore, the Indian policy makers should rigorously work and promote the policies such as Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) as reduction in fiscal deficits, trade imbalances will also be reduced.

This study contributes to the existing literature on ‘twin deficit’ and trade openness by giving new evidence on the trilemma between designing sustainable fiscal policy by spending wisely without imperilling the country's global presence and CAD.

Corruption and dishonesty in the political and bureaucratic realms have impeded the ability of local governments to provide services and social justice in Nepali society. In light of this, the purpose of this research is to answer the key research question: what are the possibilities and limitations of local government in implementing constitutionally guaranteed rights in order to transform local communities?

This study gathered qualitative data from 14 local governments in seven provinces. A total of 56 in-depth interviews were held with elected representatives, political parties, and government officials at both the national and local levels. Both open-ended and open-structured questionnaires were employed for the interviews.

The results indicate that capacity is a major constraint for local governments, which should be addressed to achieve successful local governance, inclusive citizen engagement, and strong technical, administrative and fiscal capabilities. Lack of local autonomy, political conflict and social class differences, external engagement, and conservative hierarchic government bureaucracy are major hurdles to growing capacity.

This paper analyses the capacity of newly restructured local governments through qualitative approach. It attempts to understand to what extent the Nepali local governments are capable in delivering the services at the local level as closest unit of the citizens.