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This article aims at shedding light on differences in terms of crisis management approaches adopted by the Italian government in order to tackle the two most impactful crises that heavily hit the entire globe in the last 15 years: the financial and economic crisis occurred in 2007/2008 and the health crisis occurred in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the article makes conceptual previsions on the potential impact of the health crisis even though, at this time, it is hard to predict the exact extent of its negative consequences.

The authors implement a comparative approach, in terms of budgetary response, to identify the differences and the consequences of the different responses provided by the Italian government to deal with the two worldwide crises.

While the economic and financial crisis occurred in the past decade required the Italian government to adopt predominantly austerity measures, the pandemic occurred due to the spreading of COVID-19 pushed the Italian government to adopt investment and fiscal policy based on tax breaks in order to allow the re-launch of the socio-economic fabric of the nation.

The originality of this paper stems from the scant research focused on the budgetary response of governments to tackle global crises. In addition, the paper endeavours to demonstrate the consequences of the myopic vision of the political leaders who, as it occurred in the Italian context, mainly aimed at maximizing the results in the short run at the expense of the potential consequences in the long run.

This paper has two purposes. First, it aims to explore how Australian universities used calculative rhetoric and practices through accounting numbers to persuade employees and legitimize their financial recovery plans to alleviate the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it aims to analyze how the accounting-based solutions were legitimized through a well-blended pathos, logos and ethos rhetoric.

Building on a rhetorical theory of diffusion, we employed a qualitative research design within all 37 Australian public universities involving Internet-based documentary analysis.

This study finds that in an urgent crisis like the fiscal crisis caused by COVID-19, universities again found rescue in accounting tools, in particular budgets, as a rhetorical device to justify their operational and strategic choices such as job-cuts, programs closures and staff pay-cuts. However, in this crisis, the same old accounting-based solutions were even more quickly to be accepted by being delivered in management’s colorful blending of pathos–logos–ethos rhetoric.

While this study is constrained to Australian public universities’ financial responses, its findings have implications for university decision-makers and higher education policymakers across the globe when it comes to university management using calculative devices in persuading employees to work their way through financial hardship caused by an extreme health crisis-like COVID-19 pandemic.

This study adds more evidence that the use of budgets as a calculative tool continues to play a key role in organizations in the construction, mobilization and preservation of certain strategic and operational choices during volatilities. Especially, the same way of creating calculative-based solutions can be communicated via the colorful blending of different rhetoric to make it acceptable.

This study examines how the strong emphasis placed on the purposes of budgeting, referring to a comprehensive focus on budgeting, is related to top managers' education and tenure while controlling for their functional positions in their respective firms and ages, as well as several company-specific predictors (information quality, firm size, information technology, importance of profit and strategy).

Survey data were collected from senior managers of large manufacturing firms in Finland and Sweden.

The results suggest that academic business education is positively associated with a comprehensive focus on budgeting, but tenure as well as functional position in the company (Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or not) and age are not. Overall, the company-specific control variables in general and information quality in particular are shown to have greater explanatory power than the top management characteristics analyzed.

This study identifies several empirically supported factors that seem to contribute to a comprehensive focus on budgeting. The effects of information quality, business education, the importance of profit and firm size could be considered in future research.

Academic business education matters more than the other top management characteristics analyzed. If organizations want to make comprehensive use of budgets, they should employ business graduates and be mindful of company-specific variables.

This study is the first to address a comprehensive focus on budgeting and some of its determinants. Future research could investigate a broader set of such determinants in different contexts.

This study aims to examine how integrated thinking principles can be used to assist those charged with governance during and after a crisis.

An autoethnographic approach was used to collect and reflect on information related to the economic, social and environmental impact of COVID-19. This was complemented with a bibliometric analysis of academic articles including “corporate governance”, “integrated thinking” and “crisis” as a keyword. This information was used to produce a data mind map of core themes. This was supplemented with a qualitative exploratory approach based on semi-structured interviews with 16 participants comprising preparers of financial statements, board members and corporate governance specialists to obtain insights into using integrated thinking in corporate governance during a crisis.

The results of the study indicate that those charged with governance can use integrated thinking to repurpose their business model by considering a multi-capital and multi-stakeholder perspective to value creation. The study highlights the importance of implementing a holistic capital integration process to gauge risks, capitalise on opportunities and improve business processes in response to a crisis. This can be leveraged by both the private and public sectors to manage a crisis and deal with the long-term indirect impacts of a crisis.

An integrated thinking approach can be used by both the private and public sectors to bolster confidence, tackle pressing social and environmental challenges and contribute to improved performance relative to the sector.

The expert interviews contribute empirical evidence to the profile of mainstream social and environmental accounting literature and offer a practical contribution by offering insights that can directly be used by organisations’ investors, non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders to manage a crisis. This paper also advances the sustainability agenda by assessing how a crisis can be managed in the context of a developing economy and advancing normative recommendations which will be broadly applicable to an international audience.

This study examined Taiwan's fiscal policy responses for sustainable post-COVID-19 recovery. The costs and benefits, aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), of fiscal policy responses were identified and valued. Although it may be too early to conclude whether the benefits outweigh the costs, the performance and outcome of fiscal measures were evaluated.

The study relied on secondary data, including governmental official data, legislative reviews, audit reports and public opinion polls to understand objective and subjective benefits and costs in economic, social and environmental dimensions. However, while the costs were measured in monetary terms, some of the benefits (i.e. satisfaction) could not be monetized; therefore, this study focused on identifying and valuing benefits from fiscal measures but set aside the issues of monetizing and discounting.

With respect to the costs, a special budget of NT$840 billion was approved, of which 66.83% was allocated for economic development, 33.12% for social welfare and 0.05% for environmental protection. In terms of the benefits, the economic growth rate was forecasted to be 5.88% in 2021 and 3.69% in 2022, while the average economic growth rate was 2.77% during the period from 2012 to 2019. Social equity was emphasized as various and customized bailout packages were provided to impacted individuals and industries. Moreover, most citizens were confident in the government's efforts to combat the pandemic and stimulate recovery in Taiwan.

This paper comprehensively details Taiwan's experience of fiscal policy responses for sustainable post-COVID-19 recovery. The cost-benefit approach was conceptually adopted. Bearing the value of “build back better” and “rebuild better,” the benefits of fiscal measures are promising, although there are indebted costs of the special budget.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how public sector accounting has changed and is changing due to public governance development.

This paper conducts a traditional literature review based on selected studies in the fields of accounting, public administration and management. The aim of the review is to explain how diverse forms of public governance influence the fate of public sector accounting, including accountability, performance measurement, budgeting and reporting practices.

Public governance is developing into more inclusive but also complex forms, resulting in network, collaborative and digital governance. Consequently, the focus and practices of public sector accounting have changed, as reflected in new types of accountability, performance measurement, budgeting and reporting practices.

Drawing upon literature from different fields enables a deeper understanding of the changes in public sector accounting. Nevertheless, the intention is not to execute a systematic literature review but to provide an overview and resolve the scattered body of knowledge generated by previous contributions. The areas of risk management and auditing were not included and deserve further attention.

This paper discusses the need to continually redefine and reassess public sector accounting practices, by recognising the interdependencies between different actors, citizens and digital technologies.

This paper explores how global pandemic crises affect the financial vulnerability of municipalities.

This paper is developed from the relevant literature an analytical framework to examine municipal financial vulnerability before a global pandemic crisis and in its immediate aftermath by mapping and systematizing its dimensions and sources. To illustrate how it can be used and evaluate its robustness and flexibility, such a tool was applied to Portugal and Italy, two countries that particularly suffered from the Covid-19 crisis.

The application of the analytical framework has shown how financially vulnerable municipalities are to global pandemic crises. Financial vulnerability relates to issues ranging from institutional design to internal financial conditions and the perception of the capacity to cope with a crisis. Results further reveal that vulnerability has an inherent contingent nature in time and space and can lead to paradoxical outcomes.

This paper provides a tool that can be useful for both academic and public policy purposes, to further appreciate municipal financial vulnerability, especially during crises.

Municipalities can use the framework to better manage their financial vulnerability, strengthening their anticipatory and copying capacities, while oversight authorities can use it to help municipalities become less financially vulnerable or, at least, more aware of their financial vulnerability.

Municipal financial vulnerability to global shocks has not been explored extensively. Also, the Covid-19 pandemic is different from previous global crises as it affected society overnight with the implementation of lockdown and social distancing measures.

Global crises have become increasingly recurrent events that jeopardize public-private partnerships (PPPs). In this context, the purpose of this paper is to expose the PPP-crisis research agenda by combining bibliometric and network analyses.

The PPP literature associated with global crises between the 2008 global financial crisis and 2022 was analyzed in three stages: (1) paper selection and screening for the inclusion/exclusion of articles relevant to this research, (2) semantic network development for examining thematic relationships among selected papers by considering the co-occurrence of keywords within the chosen studies and (3) calculation of network metrics for analysis.

The paper identified six research avenues for the PPP-crisis agenda: public interest, relational governance, risk management, user-pay PPPs, crisis management and financial performance. The PPP-crisis literature has spread significantly in the last five years driven by the case study approaches on a national or regional basis. Conversely, non-crisis periods generate room to strengthen user-pay PPPs and relational governance. The pandemic and post-pandemic times shared the priorities of the 2008 financial crisis but also strengthened the management of the risks and the structural drivers of the global crisis.

This study demonstrates that during global crisis periods, the public interest and financial performance gain relevance in a detriment of structural solutions to social legitimacy erosion of PPPs because of the urgency of giving tools to the public and private sectors to tackle the financial issues, which steer future issues for PPPs.

This research aims to analyse the perceptions of practitioners in three regions regarding the challenges faced by their firms during the pandemic, considered a black-swan event. It examines the strategies implemented to mitigate and recover from risks, evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies and assesses the difficulties encountered in their implementation.

In the summer of 2022, an online survey was conducted among supply chain (SC) practitioners in France, Poland and the St. Louis, Missouri region of the USA. The survey aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 on their firms and the SC strategies employed to sustain operations. These regions were selected due to their varying levels of SC development, including infrastructure, economic resources and expertise. Moreover, they exhibited different responses in safeguarding the well-being of their citizens during the pandemic.

The study reveals consistent perceptions among practitioners from the three regions regarding the impact of COVID-19 on SCs. Their actions to enhance SC resilience primarily relied on strengthening collaborative efforts within their firms and SCs, thus validating the tenets of the relational view.

COVID-19 is (hopefully) our black-swan pandemic occurrence during our lifetime. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from it can inform future SC risk management practices, particularly in dealing with rare crises. During times of crisis, leveraging existing SC structures may prove more effective and efficient than developing new ones. These findings underscore the significance of relationships in ensuring SC resilience.