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This paper aims to explore the development and implementation of enterprise policy in China, and the emergence of intermediaries and local strategies designed to encourage SME development.

The paper is based on interviews and workshops held with local and national government in 2003 and 2006, and informed by reference to and analysis of the policy and academic literature.

The dynamics and nature of local implementation of national enterprise legislation are mapped out, indicating an interactive dynamic between central government directive, local government adoption and response, and localised dynamics of enterprise and economic development. This “three‐way” model provides a nuanced explanation of local implementation of national enterprise legislation.

The framework can be used at the municipal level to understand how national enterprise legislation can be implemented. The framework also points to wider patterns of local implementation of national government legislation.

The paper provides a detailed model of local policy implementation, using the SME Promotion Law as a specific case of legislation.

Legislation plays an essential role in addressing climate change in China. However, many barriers to formulating national legislation to address climate change have so far prevented its enactment. The bottom-up approach adopted in the international climate regime sets a good example. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the regional legislation to address climate change in China through exploring the following two questions: whether it is necessary to enact climate change legislation at regional level first and whether it is feasible to develop such regional legislation in the absence of national climate change law.

This paper analyses the necessity and feasibility of regional legislation to address climate change. Section 2 introduces the current legislative framework on climate change in China. Section 3 investigates whether it is better to push the legislative agenda at regional, rather than national level. Section 4 analyses the feasibility of establishing regional legislative systems. Section 5 explores the key issues in formulating and promoting regional legislation.

This paper concludes that it is necessary and feasible to pilot regional legislation before enacting national legislation. Under these circumstances, local governments can take the initiative to begin formulating regional legislation.

Addressing climate change needs immediate action and effective measures. It is, thus, necessary to reconsider the approach that China should adopt when developing legislation on climate change. This paper contributes to broadening current knowledge of regional climate change legislation in China.

Reverse logistics (RL) is a waste revaluation process aimed at reintroducing once-used materials back into the production cycle. Public administration (PA) plays a strong role in influencing the implementation of RL in the construction industry through policy and laws. While much research identifies PA as an important driver in RL, no research yet describes how this occurs.

A systematic literature review was conducted on the theme PA in RL with 93 relevant publications retrieved.

Six strategies used by PA to promote RL were extracted: (1) legislation, (2) government subsidies, (3) landfill disposal fee, (4) government inspection, (5) use in public construction works and (6) penalties and fines. Moreover, a typology built on these six strategies was developed, mapping 15 interactional relationships between strategies, according to three levels of influence: (1) encouragement (2) requirement and (3) regulation.

It was found that legislation and government subsidies prove to be the more effective strategies, with the remaining strategies greatly neglected. Importantly, however, this study reveals that a combination of strategies are most effective when appropriately combined.

This study confirms the importance of PA in RL, in construction, while documenting the extent of current research. The resulting proposed typology, along with 15 identified future research priorities, is expected to be of value to academics and policy makers looking to advance understanding in this domain.

Local government is the second or third tier of government deliberately created to bring government to the grassroots population, as well as give its members a sense of involvement in the political process that controls their daily lives. Decentralization is a natural indispensable counterpart to pluralistic democracy, i.e. it extends the work of democracy and fulfils democratic aspirations. Consequently, any political reform aimed at democratizing institutions, will only be effective if it is accompanied by far‐reaching administrative reforms which effectively redistribute power. In South Africa’s political circumstances as a country of almost 40 million, constituted of heterogeneous cultural and political groups, the need for effective decentralized democratic local government as a vehicle for development and national integration is imperative. The current interim constitution reflects a certain degree of decentralization. It exhibits a highly visible effort and a bold move towards full autonomy. The country currently has nine provinces and approximately 700 transitional non‐racial local authorities. The November 1995 and May/June 1996 local government elections was a watershed in political history and was the last chapter in the democratization of the South African State. The relationship between central, provisional and local authorities has been debated and the view is that elected officials must wield real power and the State wishes to protect local government. Details powers, functions and structures of local government will be defined in terms of provincial legislation. However, although local governments are creatures of provincial legislation and provisional government will exercise control over them, they will still have a reasonable amount of autonomy. The process has therefore been underway to determine the constitutional and legal position of local government in relation to central and provincial government. An important issue was the possible devolution of powers and functions to local government. The State is nurturing a co‐operative system where measures to harmonize relations between central, provincial and local governments are encouraged and promoted. The new South African State as defined by the new Constitution will be highly centralized as provincial power over local government is limited. Central government’s legislative competence over local government is strengthened as the former must determine the appropriate fiscal powers and functions of each category of local government. However, the final analysis, the purpose of the Constitution should not be forgotten. It is intended to define the basic rules in terms of which the country should be governed. The Constitution proposes the idea of recognizing distinct “spheres” of government as opposed to “levels” of government. The implication of this is that one tier of government is not inferior to the other. Each sphere of government is given definite responsibilities on which the other spheres are not allowed to encroach.

This study aims to investigate a framework for implementation of legislative framework governing records management throughout the life cycle in the Limpopo provincial government of South Africa.

This quantitative multi-method study used a semi-structured questionnaire, document analysis and interviews to collect data. The dominant approach was quantitative, with some support from limited qualitative data, which served to clarify the statistical data. No sampling method was applied, as the study targeted the entire population of 135 records management participants from the provincial departments with the questionnaire, while nine participants from provincial archives participated in interviews.

The study revealed that the role of the provincial archives in enforcing compliance with legislative frameworks for the proper management of records was always disrupted by a lack of key resources such as staffing, for inspecting and training records-creating departments and working resources at the departmental levels.

The findings will contribute to the field in respect of future studies into compliance with records management legislation, and the proposed framework may be applied as a theoretical basis for, or part of, a conceptual framework.

The study will serve as a resource or benchmark for archivists and records management professionals in the industry, as they count amongst the policymakers who find ways of monitoring, evaluating and enforcing compliance with the legislation governing proper records management.

The proper implementation of recommendations from this study will lead to significant improvements in the management of records with enduring value, allowing them to finally be transferred to an archival repository to serve the public interest as heritage, national memory, or resources for researchers and authors, amongst others.

The study proposes a framework for implementation of legislation governing records management with greater ease in the Limpopo provincial government of South Africa.

Drawing on the control agency theory and the network effect theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of privacy assurance approaches, network externality and technology complementarity on consumers’ self-disclosure in mobile payment (MP) applications. The authors identify four types of privacy assurance approaches: perceived effectiveness of privacy setting, perceived effectiveness of privacy policy, perceived effectiveness of industry self-regulation and perceived effectiveness of government legislation. The research model considers how these privacy assurance approaches influence privacy concerns and consumers’ self-disclosure in MP applications under boundary conditions of network externality and technology complementarity.

An online survey with 647 sample users was conducted to empirically validate the model. The target respondents were current consumers of a popular MP application. The empirical data were analyzed by a structural equation modeling approach.

The empirical results reveal several major findings. First, privacy assurance approaches can effectively decrease privacy concerns, which ultimately formulates consumers’ self-disclosure in MP applications. Second, network externality and technology complementarity weaken the effect of perceived effectiveness of privacy setting on privacy concerns. Third, network externality and technology complementarity strengthen the relationship between perceived effectiveness of government legislation and privacy concerns, while they have non-significant interaction effect with perceived effectiveness of privacy policy and industry self-regulation on privacy concerns.

MP providers and stakeholders can harness the efficacy of privacy assurance approaches in alleviating privacy concerns and promoting consumers’ self-disclosure in MP applications.

The authors’ work contributes to the information privacy literature by identifying effective privacy assurance approaches in promoting consumers’ self-disclosure in MP applications, and by highlighting boundary conditions of these privacy assurance approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to illuminate some of the dynamics of globalization that enable capital to advance its interests.

The paper uses theories of globalization focusing upon the “race‐to‐the‐bottom”. Such theories draw attention to the way major businesses are using their power to secure advantages, often by playing‐off one nation state against another. Increasingly, offshore financial centres (OFCs) are becoming key players in this race. The paper uses a case study relating to the enactment of limited liability partnership (LLP) in Jersey, a UK Crown Dependency. The legislation was financed and developed by the UK firms, Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young in collaboration with a network of advisers.

The paper sheds light on the resources deployed by major accountancy firms to secure conditions necessary for the smooth accumulation of private wealth and power. Accountancy firms used OFCs or microstates to reposition the state‐capital relationship in globalization and reconfigure the UK auditor liability laws. The paper also highlights the importance of the state to capital and globalization.

In common with major capitalist enterprises, accountancy firms rarely provide background material to explain how they advance their interests. Inevitably, this limits the analysis. Nevertheless, the case study shows some trajectories that have enabled accountancy firms to advance their economic interests.

The paper shows that accountancy firms are able to use novel tactics to advance their interests and that national regulation cannot easily be understood without consideration of the wider international context.

Accounting researchers have rarely focused upon the use of offshore financial centres by major accountancy firms to advance their interests. It also shows that the local and the global are intertwined.

Do budget institutions play a role in explaining why government effectiveness is higher in some advanced countries than in others?

Employing an original panel data set that covers four years (1991, 2003, 2007 and 2012), we find that budget centralization is associated with lower government effectiveness in OECD countries after accounting for a list of control variables, such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, government expenditure and country- and year-fixed effects.

We show that less-centralized countries display significantly better performance in health and infrastructure and a similar effectiveness in tax collections. The negative relationship between budget centralization and government effectiveness seems to manifest, especially at the execution stage of the budgeting process, but it is not significant at the formulation and legislation stages. These results survive a list of sensitivity tests.

Our paper finds that centralization is associated with lower effectiveness in field areas like health and education. However, it has been previously shown that centralization improves fiscal responsibility. Thus, our findings point out to the need of achieving the right balance between fiscal responsibility and government effectiveness.

Results suggest that when governments at the national level are aiming at achieving effectiveness in field areas like health and education, they shall avoid excessive centralization at the execution stage of the budget.

Effectiveness in the provision of public health, and education can be enhanced by giving more power to the field ministries at the execution stage of the budget preparation.

While decentralized budget power was proved at the local government level, this paper belongs to the small group of contributions that deal with this issue at the central government level.

It has been said of most instruments that attempt to guarantee basic rights that they usually give with one hand what they then retrieve with the other. Convention No.87 provides, in Article 2, the right for “workers and employers, without distinction whatsoever to establish and subject, only to the rules of the organisation concerned, to join organisations of their own choosing without previous authorisation”. By Article 8 (1) however, the forces of freedom unleashed in Article 2 are bridled. “In exercising the rights provided for in this Convention, workers and employers and their respective organisations, like other persons or organised collectives, shall respect the law of the land”. And the provisions of Article 9(1) make it possible for the Police and the Army to forego that right: “The extent to which the guarantees provided for in this convention shall apply to the armed forces and the police shall be determined by national laws or regulations.” Such a situation creates a rife hotbed for claims and counter‐claims between any of the three main players in industrial relations, namely, the state, the employer, and the employee. Besides, Article 8 (1) makes very generous assumptions of national law. When read with the rest of this Convention, Article 8 seems to suggest that all States are in some way, oriented towards the pluralistic frame of reference in their labour law; recognising that in the employment relationship, there is not one, but several sources of authority. Pluralism holds that employers and employees interests are diametrically opposed to each other, and that they are held in the balance by the common need of keeping the enterprise alive. For pluralists, the trade union is a welcome vehicle for communication. But is such an assumption realistic? What becomes of workers and employers in State “X”, whose frame of reference in labour law is strictly unitary; holding that there is only one legitimate source of authority in the employment situation: the employer? The interests of the worker and the employer are said to be the same. The trade union is therefore an unnecessary and unwelcome threat to stability? Further, does Article 8 allow such a State to maintain its legislation over the minimum standards of the Convention as set in Articles 1 to 7?