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Decentralised administrative arrangements and the active function of local government organisations are essential to tackle crisis effectively. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this paper examines the central and local government administrative arrangements during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study applies qualitative content analysis and interviews to explore the local government’s role in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 management by interviews of 18 participants including government officials, experts, non-government organisations (NGOs) representatives, and the general public. This paper also analysed academic papers, policy documents and other publicly available documents, including newspaper reports.

The Constitution of Bangladesh intensified the active participation of local government in each administrative unit through decentralised administrative management. This paper however reveals that the administrative arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh was primarily a centrally led system. The local government was not sufficiently involved, nor had it integrated into the planning and coordination process. This indicated the absence of active decentralised administration.

This study fills the research gap of the administrative pattern and local relations in COVID-19 management by exploring the local government’s role during the catastrophic situation and highlights the importance of decentralised administrative actions in managing the crisis.

This survey explores the application of real options theory to the field of health economics. The integration of options theory offers a valuable framework to address these challenges, providing insights into healthcare investments, policy analysis and patient care pathways.

This research employs the real options theory, a financial concept, to delve into health economics challenges. Through a systematic approach, three distinct models rooted in this theory are crafted and analyzed. Firstly, the study examines the value of investing in emerging health technology, factoring in future advantages, associated costs and unpredictability. The second model is patient-centric, evaluating the choice between immediate treatment switch and waiting for more clarity, while also weighing the associated risks. Lastly, the research assesses pandemic-related government policies, emphasizing the importance of delaying decisions in the face of uncertainties, thereby promoting data-driven policymaking.

Three different real options models are presented in this study to illustrate their applicability and value in aiding decision-makers. (1) The first evaluates investments in new technology, analyzing future benefits, discount rates and benefit volatility to determine investment value. (2) In the second model, a patient has the option of switching treatments now or waiting for more information before optimally switching treatments. However, waiting has its risks, such as disease progression. By modeling the potential benefits and risks of both options, and factoring in the time value, this model aids doctors and patients in making informed decisions based on a quantified assessment of potential outcomes. (3) The third model concerns pandemic policy: governments can end or prolong lockdowns. While awaiting more data on the virus might lead to economic and societal strain, the model emphasizes the economic value of deferring decisions under uncertainty.

This research provides a quantified perspective on various decisions in healthcare, from investments in new technology to treatment choices for patients to government decisions regarding pandemics. By applying real options theory, stakeholders can make more evidence-driven decisions.

Decisions about patient care pathways and pandemic policies have direct societal implications. For instance, choices regarding the prolongation or ending of lockdowns can lead to economic and societal strain.

The originality of this study lies in its application of real options theory, a concept from finance, to the realm of health economics, offering novel insights and analytical tools for decision-makers in the healthcare sector.

Relational contracting is increasingly being applied to complex and uncertain construction projects. However, it has proved hard to achieve stable performance and industry-level learning in this field. This paper employs an institutional perspective to analyze how legitimacy for relational contracting has been produced and challenged in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, including implications for dissemination and learning.

A collaborative case study design is used, where longitudinal accounts of the developments in relational contracting over more than 25 years in four Nordic countries were developed by scholars based in each country. The descriptions are underpinned by literature sources from research, practice and policy.

The countries share similar problem perceptions that have triggered the de-institutionalization of traditional contracting practices. Models and policies developed elsewhere are important sources of knowledge and legitimacy. Most countries have seen pendulum movements, where dissemination of relational contracting is followed by backlashes when projects fail to meet projected outcomes. Before long, however, relational contracting tends to re-emerge under new labels and in slightly new forms. Such a proliferation of concepts presents further obstacles to learning. Successful institutionalization is found to rely on realistic goals in combination with broad competence development at the organizational and industry levels.

In seeking inspiration from other countries, policymakers should go beyond contract models to also consider strategies to manage industry-level learning.

The paper provides a unique longitudinal cross-country perspective on the field of relational contracting. As such, it contributes to the small stream of literature on long-term institutional change in the construction sector.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

The construction industry has considerably evolved in the recent two decades due to the emergence of sustainability, lean construction (LC) and building information modelling (BIM). Despite previous research efforts, there is still a gap concerning the multidimensional nature of their integration. Hence, this study aims to fill the mentioned knowledge gap through exploring and comparing the challenges, enablers, techniques as well as benefits of integrating LC with BIM and sustainability in building construction projects.

A systematic literature review was conducted to fulfill the purpose of this study.

The findings reveal and compare the challenges, enablers, techniques and benefits of integrating LC with BIM and sustainability in building construction projects. The results suggest that there are eight common challenges for integrating LC with BIM and sustainability, including high initial cost, lack of collaboration, lack of professionals and lack of compatible contractual framework. The discovered challenges, enablers, techniques and benefits seem to be mostly routed in people. The findings also suggest that the synergistic benefits of integrating LC with BIM and sustainability can overcome the common challenges (safety, reliability, productivity, collaboration and quality) in construction projects.

The findings contribute to the literature and practice concerning the integration of LC with BIM and sustainability by exploring, comparing and discussing the relevant challenges, enablers, techniques as well as benefits. Moreover, the findings reveal the significance of the development of people in construction industry, besides processes and technology, as people are always subject of activities in construction while processes and technology are always objects.

Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective. The authors analyse the level, reach and quality of social policy delivery to working-age women across the areas of health policy, social protection and employment policy during 2000–2021.

The article draws on qualitative research deploying the scoping review method. The data consist of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics and other types of “grey” literature.

Tanzania has made significant advancements in the legal frameworks around welfare provision and has instituted increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans. The health and social protection sectors, in particular, have witnessed the introduction of large-scale measures expanding social policy implementation. However, social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors.

Social policy delivery and implementation have increased and diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the new millennium, with a growing integration of gender-specific policy objectives. However, limited social policy scholarship has focused on the gendered effects of broader social policy models in SSA. The article remedies the concomitant knowledge gaps by examining various social policies and their impacts on working-age women in Mainland Tanzania. The authors also engage with the theoretical welfare regime literature and present an analytical framework for gender-sensitive assessment of emerging social policy models in the Global South.

High levels of child obesity alongside rising stunting and the absence of a coherent food policy have deemed UK’s food system to be broken. The National Food Strategy (NFS) was debated intensely in media, with discussions on how and who should fix the food system.

Using a mixed methods approach, the authors conduct framing analysis on traditional media and sentiment analysis of twitter reactions to the NFS to identify frames used to shape food system policy interventions.

The study finds evidence that the media coverage of the NFS often utilised the tropes of “culture wars” shaping the debate of who is responsible to fix the food system – the government, the public or the industry. NFS recommendations were portrayed as issues of free choice to shift the debate away from government action correcting for market failure. In contrast, the industry was showcased as equipped to intervene on its own accord. Dietary recommendations made by the NFS were depicted as hurting the poor, painting a picture of helplessness and loss of control, while their voices were omitted and not represented in traditional media.

British media’s alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system. Media firms should move beyond tropes of culture wars to discuss interventions that reform the structural causes of the UK’s broken food systems.

As traditional media coverage struggles to capture the diversity of public perception; the authors supplement framing analysis with sentiment analysis of Twitter data. To the best of our knowledge, no such media (and social media) analysis of the NFS has been conducted. The paper is also original as it extends our understanding of how media alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the influence of budgeting process elements (budget participation, preparation, implementation and evaluation) on budget performance of government.

A cross-sectional survey was administered among budget officers from government agencies, departments, and units in Malaysia. Descriptive and regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between the budgeting process and budget performance.

The findings revealed the significant influence of the two predictors: (1) budget participation and (2) budget implementation and evaluation, on budget performance. Both have positive and significant impacts on budget performance. However, budget preparation appeared to have no significant relationship with budget performance, although there is positive effect.

This study provides empirical evidence on the budgeting process factors that influence budget performance. The findings hopefully are of interest to government officials, especially frontline bureaucrats, who seek to ensure that budget performance meets expectations in Malaysia and other countries.

Studies showed that construction digitalisation could prevent or mitigate accidents rate on sites. Digitalisation applications may prevent or mitigate building project collapse (BPC) but with some encumbrances, especially in developing countries. There is a paucity of research on digital technologies application to prevent or mitigate BPC in Nigeria. Thus, the research aims to explore the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies from preventing or mitigating building collapse and recommend measures to improve technology applications during development.

The study is exploratory because of the unexplored approach. The researchers collected data from knowledgeable participants in digitalisation and building collapse in Nigeria. The research employed a phenomenology approach and analysed collected data via a thematic approach. The study achieved saturation at the 29th interviewee.

Findings show that lax construction digitalisation implementation, absence of regulatory framework, lax policy, unsafe fieldworkers' behaviours, absence of basic infrastructure, government attitude, hesitation to implement and high technology budget, especially in developing countries, are threats to curbing building collapse menace via digitalisation. The study identified technologies relevant to preventing or mitigating building collapse. Also, it proffered measures to prevent or mitigate building collapse via improved digital technology applications during development.

This research contributes to the construction digitalisation literature, especially in developing countries, and investigates the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies usage in preventing or mitigating building collapse in Nigeria.

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the relationship between fiscal policy and total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for several economic and econometric issues of the phenomenon like non-stationarity, fiscal feedback effects, persistence in productivity, country heterogeneity and unobserved global shocks and local spillovers affecting heterogeneously the countries in the sample.

The paper is empirical. It builds an Error Correction Model (ECM) specification within a dynamic heterogeneous framework with common correlated effects and models both reverse causality and feedback effects.

The results of this study highlight some new findings relative to the existing related literature. The outcomes suggest some relevant evidence at both the academic and policy levels: (1) the causal effects going from fiscal deficit/surplus to TFP are heterogeneous across countries; (2) the effects depend on the time horizon considered; (3) the long-run dynamics of TFP are positively impacted by improvements in fiscal budget, but only if the austerity measures do not exert slowdowns in aggregate growth.

The main originality of this study is methodological, with possible extensions to related phenomena. Relative to the existing literature, the gains of this study rely on the way econometric techniques, recently proposed in the literature, are adapted to the economic relationship of interest. The endogeneity due to the existence of reverse causality is modelled without implying relevant performance losses of the models. Moreover, this is the first article that questions whether the effects of fiscal budget on productivity depend on the impact of the former on aggregate output growth, thus emphasising the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments.