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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the outcomes of the financial optimization process launched by the recent reforms in the Russian higher education sector and its impact on access to higher education, its quality and competitiveness within the sector. The study of the economic performance of higher educational institutions includes complex analysis of financial and educational components of their structural dynamics and their impact on their development strategy.

The methods used in the study of the segmentation of the higher education sector involve a combination of theoretical developments in economics and the modeling of the economic behavior of universities on the market for educational services, procedures for the evaluation of transaction costs in the markets with asymmetric information and recent conceptions of the interrelation of factors affecting quality and accessibility of higher education.

In this paper, the economic potential of Russian universities is considered, making use of a segmentation of the higher education sector, based on sampling of state and municipal higher education institutions from different industry groups, depending on their development strategy under changing social and economic conditions. The research data for 2006‐2009 help to define five clusters of the higher educational establishments with different approaches towards public funding and different strategies.

Based on the research data, the paper evaluates the current situation in the Russian higher education sector and some skewed structures of the reforms and outlines some policy implications.

This paper aims to show the aligned development that took place in public administration and public financial management toward serving public values. By analyzing the mode of institutions’ interaction, the paper attempts to pinpoint the changing trends in budget institutions in Egypt, probing the extent to which they can be read from an administrative perspective and the possibility of enhancing budgetary outcomes under the existing administrative arrangements.

An analytical framework for public management administrative and budgetary institutions’ alignment is presented. A ladder analysis is developed to highlight the consistency of rationale between the two sets of institutions. The alignment is demonstrated at three consecutive levels: control and discipline, efficiency and effectiveness and openness and communication.

The international experience reveals that the alignment of administrative and budgetary institutions is both theoretically traceable and practically applicable in the case of developed economies. Whereas, in the case of Egypt, both sets of institutions have been exposed to best practices; yet, they are not seen as complementary and enforcing each other. The internalization of the benefits of reforms in the two tracks into an integrated public management context in the case of Egypt is not reached.

Egypt needs to ensure the alignment of both dimensions to maximize the benefits of reform.

The ladder approach sorts the developments in both administrative and budgetary institutions into three levels to help assessing the maturity and conformity in countries’ public management systems.

The objective of this study is to understand the budgetary role of national legislatures in euro area (EA) countries and to analyse implications for fiscal discipline.

Building on the budget institutions literature, a legislative budgetary power index for all the 19 euro area (EA) countries is constructed using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Commission data as well as data generated from questionnaires to national authorities. A two-way fixed effects panel data model is then used to assess the effect of legislative budgetary power on the budget balance in the EA during 2006–2015.

Overall, in the EA, formal legislative powers vis-à-vis the national budgetary process are weak, but there is more legislative involvement in Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) procedures, and legislative budgetary organisational capacity is generally quite good. In contrast to the traditional view in the budget institutions literature, this study’s empirical findings show that strong legislative budgetary power does not necessarily result in larger budget deficits.

Data on legislative budgeting were available from different sources, and time series data were very limited.

There is scope to improve democratic legitimacy of the national budgetary process in the EA, without necessarily jeopardising fiscal discipline.

The constructed legislative budgetary power index covers all the 19 EA countries and has a broad scope covering various novel institutional characteristics. The empirical analysis contributes to the scarce literature on the impact of legislative budgeting on fiscal discipline.

Recently many European countries have incurred crises in public finance despite the fact that EU institutions have pushed the national governments toward the sustainability of public finance with compulsory and voluntary rules regarding fiscal governance. This paper investigates the relations between the quality of fiscal governance and the financial virtuosity of national fiscal policy. We proposed a general framework for analyzing the fiscal governance issue and we empirically tested the correlation between the dimensions of fiscal governance and the budgetary performance of EU countries. The results showed a positive correlation between the quality of fiscal governance in the EU countries and financial surplus in the period concerned. However further investigations are needed and an effort should be made to collect uniform data on fiscal governance in the European Union.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal and justify influential factors of dynamic capabilities on research organizations’ R&D and innovation performance.

Adoption of seminal D. Teece’s (1997) concept of dynamic capabilities and operationalized matrix of key performance indicators in the area of R&D and innovation allowed the construction of the strategic management model for research organizations, consequently tested by methods of statistical analysis.

The empirical findings reveal that there exists positive influence of the dynamic capabilities on research organizations’ R&D and innovation performance. Explicitly, sensing, seizing and re-configuring dimensions of dynamic capabilities have positive impact on R&D and innovation results; consequently, the peculiarities of their inter-dependencies are identified.

Delivered research is based on the investigation of Lithuanian research organizations’ dynamic capabilities and their impact on their R&D and innovation performance. Therefore, further research could be extended to foreign countries.

The model on management of research organization’s dynamic capabilities with the aim for better R&D and innovation performance is conceptualized and specified hereinafter. In the course of the research, constructed toolkit to eventually measure research organization’s R&D and innovation performance or use it as the set of key performance indicators in the benchmarking exercise is suggested.

The paper is one of the first to suggest novel application of dynamic capabilities’ view within the domain of research organizations.

This study aims to investigate the influence of budgetary participation on budget quality on top of the moderating role of environmental uncertainty on the said relationship.

The objectives of the current study were achieved through a survey conducted in 15 Iraqi states. Each state contains several municipalities. In total, 180 survey forms were disseminated to the heads of the municipalities, where ultimately 155 questionnaires proceeded to the data analysis stage. In this stage, statistical package for social sciences, analysis of moment structure and structural equation modelling were used to solve the research problem and achieve the objectives.

Through the results of the statistical analysis, this study concluded the significant and positive effect of budgetary participation on budget quality. In addition, the study confirmed the moderating role of environmental uncertainty in weakening the positive relationship between budgetary participation and budget quality.

The findings can be used to encourage municipal institutions and local governments to expand on the factor of employee participation in affecting the process of budget determination, hence mitigating budget failure.

The transition to democracy and a free market economy in Hungary and other Central European nations has provided a unique opportunity to study rapid change in budget systems, institutions, and policies. This article examines budgeting in Hungary since 1989, beginning with an analysis of the comparative budgeting literature in an attempt to identify an appropriate theoretical framework for the study. Then it explores budgetary definition and measurement problems, debt and economic conditions, external actors and constraints on the budget, budget institutions and process, and the impact of Parliament on the budget and concludes by assessing the problems and prospects for Hungarian budgeting.

This article examines the effect of party composition of government on the centralization of budgeting institutions in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria in 1989-1999, and assesses the impact of the centralization of budgeting institutions on the capacity of these countries to meet the fiscal deficit requirement for the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) membership. The article finds that centralization of budgeting institutions through delegation to a strong finance minister and/or prime minister is likely to occur in one-party governments or coalition governments composed of parties which expect to fight repeated elections together, with effective punishment mechanisms. The article finds that countries with centralized budgeting institutions are likely to be more capable of meeting the EMU deficit requirement than countries with decentralized institutions.

This study aims to investigate how actors’ responses to competing logics (academic and business logics) in budgetary practices in a university setting in Tanzania were shaped by state pressure, market pressure and organizational characteristics (funding certainty and changes in university ownership) and how actors’ agency was exercised in enacting competing logics.

The data for this study were collected from interviews, observations, informal discussions and document review. The data analysis processes were guided by institutional logic concepts and the role of actors’ agency.

The findings demonstrate how academic logic traditionally subsisted in a university setting in which there was funding certainty. Changes in the university’s ownership resulted in funding uncertainty. Market and state pressure increased the intensity of funding uncertainty, which supported business logic. While market logic supported the emergence of business logic, state pressure altered the balance of the competing logics. University actors responded by selective coupling and compartmentalizing where both elements of academic and business logics were enacted. While managers prioritized business logic, academics prioritized academic logic. However, the role of agency was exercised in actors’ responses, subverting both academic and business logics.

Managers should appropriately enact both elements of competing logics to avoid marginalization of some of the core university activities. In addition, profitable business ideas should be considered, identified, planned and implemented successfully. Moreover, there is a need to change the historically contingent and culturally situated environment when enacting competing logics. Furthermore, the state influence on universities should be considered to prevent unnecessary uncertainties in budgetary practices.

The paper demonstrates how selective coupling and compartmentalizing strategies were used by actors to enact both elements of competing logics in budgetary practices in a university setting. It further shows how actors’ agency influenced and subverted competing logics. The paper, thus, responds to the recent calls to investigate the influence of institutional logics on control practices, and the role of actors in strategically handling different logics in developing countries (Damayanthi and Gooneratne, 2017; Argento et al., 2020; Anessi-Pessina et al., 2016; Grossi et al., 2020). It further suggests new analysis of academic and business logics in their context.