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This study aims to elucidate institutional analysis as an effective approach to investigating and designing the multilevel policymaking system of online social networks (OSN) for achieving a participatory model.

The institutional mapping approach has been used to analyze Iran’s OSN multilevel policymaking system. A combination of two matrices, including institutions-institutions and institutions-functions, was used to perform the institutional mapping. Two main steps were taken to draw the mentioned matrices. First, a review of related studies in Iran’s OSN policymaking system was conducted and the policy functions mentioned in these studies were identified and categorized using the meta-synthesis. Second, based on analyzing two policy documents of Iran’s OSN, institutions and their interactions were identified and policy functions were allocated to institutions.

Based on the results, the most important policy functions in the current OSN policymaking system in Iran are support, regulatory, monitoring and evaluation, business environment development, culture building and promotion, organizing licenses and permissions, policymaking and legislation. Also, the results show that there are shortcomings in this system, some of the most important of which are lack of transparency in regulatory, little work in culture building and promotion, neglect of the training of specialized human resources and research and development, slow development of the business environment and neglecting the role of nongovernmental organizations in policymaking.

By examining and analyzing how different institutions operate within a multilevel policymaking system, the policymaking process and its overall effectiveness can be enhanced. This analysis helps identify any inconsistencies, overlaps or conflicts in the roles and policies of these institutions, leading to a better understanding of how a multilevel policymaking system is organized.

This paper aims to analyse how democratic institutions affects social spending formations in the context of developing countries. Furthermore, this essay will also challenge the theory that the government system (majoritarian versus consensus democracy) influences the magnitude of social spending and welfare commitment, especially in Southeast Asian democracies, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

This research uses descriptive statistics and qualitative data to match social spending with the development of democratisation in four cases.

The main argument is whether the presence of democratic institutions encourages the government to be more open, citizen-oriented and responsive or whether the inclusive political conditions will create more open public participation in the policymaking process. Thus, in the context of developing countries, public participation will be more likely to demand social policies.

It has not been able to undertake a more detailed impact evaluation assessment of the development and change of democratic institutions towards policy outcomes within a shorter temporal scope. In addition, this thesis does not also provide details or explanations about the interaction process between particular democratic institutions and specific social policy sectors.

The process of interactions between particular electoral systems. For instance, the contribution to the emergence of policy in the health services sector or conducting research in normative democratic institutions such as public awareness of the importance of public participation in shaping and directing the implementation of poverty reduction policies could be studied, by using the historical institutionalism approach.

The impact of certain political institutions on public policy has become a very important discussion in the new institutionalism perspective. Social policy (social spending) as a manifestation of government’s commitment towards welfare is the result of institutional arrangement. In the context of developing countries, where social policy is needed to fulfill the basic needs of citizens, it is important to identify what kind of institutional formations are conducive to the development of social policy. This essay will analyse how democratic institutions affects social spending formations in the context of developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of fiscal policy and institutional quality on the inclusive growth process of the selected developing Asian countries. Inclusive growth is a growth process which ensures that everyone is participating and benefited by growth process.

This study uses system generalized method of moment to address the problem of endogeneity and omitted variable bias.

Empirical results showed that both fiscal policy and institutions have positive effects on inclusive growth. Our empirical results confirmed that fiscal policy can work more efficiently in the presence of good quality institutions in the developing Asian countries.

Government should take measures to improve infrastructure, roads and transport system, and main share of government expenditures should be allocated to development, education and health projects. There is a need to transform the tax structure of the countries with the huge emphasis on the progressive tax system and this is likely to benefit the lower segment of the population. There is a need to develop institutions as they serve as a road map for the development of a country. There should be coordination between government policies and institutions. Supervision of fiscal policy through good institutions is needed for the proper allocation and utilization of public resources.

By restructuring the taxation system subject to the provision of quality institutions, government can incentivize entrepreneurs to make significant investments. This creates jobs for lower segment of a society, brings down poverty and increases the income level of a country. This increases the individual and collective welfare of an economy that ensures the inclusive growth within a country.

In this study, proxies used for fiscal policy are government expenditures and tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) to examine its impact on the certain measures of inclusive growth such as employment, income inequality and GDP per capita. This study provides useful insights for the policy makers using fiscal policy to achieve the goal of inclusive growth in developing countries.

This paper aims to report on a census of high-level sustainability initiatives at all accredited post-secondary institutions in Canada by documenting the institutions that have undertaken sustainability assessments, have signed one or more sustainability declarations, have sustainability offices or officers or have sustainability policies. The aim was to better understand the broad-scale patterns of commitments by post-secondary institutions to these sustainability initiatives by exploring the interrelationships among them, and with geographic and institutional characteristics.

Data were collected on existing high-level sustainability initiatives at Canada’s 220 accredited post-secondary institutions. Patterns in the data were analyzed using exploratory statistical techniques. This paper proposes a sustainability initiative score to help understand the diversity and patterns of sustainability initiative uptake.

Institutions located in larger communities, and in British Columbia and Québec, tended to have higher sustainability initiative scores. Institutions in Saskatchewan and the territories had the lowest sustainability initiative scores. It was found that sustainability office(r)s, assessments and policies co-occurred disproportionately, potentially suggesting positive reinforcement mechanisms. On the other hand, having signed a declaration was not strongly linked to other sustainability initiatives. Terminological preference had shifted from “environment” and “sustainable development” to “sustainability”.

The scope was limited to a discrete set of high-level sustainability initiatives appropriate for a nation-wide census, at a moment in time, and is therefore not exhaustive in subject or temporal extent. This broad-scale comparative analysis compels further study into the relationship between the sustainability policy environment and sustainability practices on the ground, as well as implications for how post-secondary institutions engage with sustainability. The patterns and interrelationships this paper discovered help to structure future critical and comparative in-depth analyses of sustainability policies and practices within post-secondary education.

Almost no extensive, comparative empirical studies of sustainability policy and practice in post-secondary institutions exist. This void is addressed by documenting and analyzing high-level sustainability initiatives across all accredited post-secondary institutions in Canada.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the development of institutional repositories (IR) in tertiary institution libraries in Nigeria.

The study adopted a survey research method. Online questionnaire and IR site investigation methods were used to collect data from 25 university libraries in Nigeria.

The study revealed that only 25 (14.7%) universities out of the 170 universities in Nigeria have successfully developed IRs and registered their presence in OpenDOAR. Other tertiary institutions such as Polytechnics and Colleges of Education investigated in Nigeria are yet to develop IRs. Contents such as theses and dissertations, conference proceedings and journal articles ranked highest being the most popular contents in the various IRs. The results showed that the development of IR saves space in the library, increases readership, increases access to local contents, minimizes damage to the original material, facilitates the dissemination of scholarly research and assists in globalization of Nigerian research findings. The IRs site investigation revealed that only few IRs have clearly defined access policy, content policy, submission policy and digital preservation policy. The study identified challenges such as inadequate facilities, unstable internet connectivity, lack of fund, irregular power supply, challenge of collecting materials for the IR, lack of skilled ICT personnel, copyright issues and absence of IR policies.

The results from the study will provide important data and insight into the development of institutional repositories in tertiary institution libraries in Nigeria, and generate suggestions for University Librarians, College Librarians, Polytechnic Librarians, tertiary institutions management and policy makers for developing institutional repositories in Nigeria and other developing countries.

The study investigated IR development in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The findings will inform other tertiary institutions in developing countries that the development of IR provides an opportunity for the visibility of local contents emanating from institutions and make them see the reason to embrace this laudable development.

In this chapter we review the recent and growing literature on medium-term growth patterns. This strand of research emerged from the realization that for most countries economic development is a highly unstable process; over a course of a few decades, a typical country enjoys periods of rapid growth as well episodes of stagnation and economic decline. This approach highlights the complex nature of growth and implies that studying transitions between periods of fast growth, stagnation, and collapse is essential for understanding the process of long run growth. We document recent efforts to characterize and study such growth transitions. We also update and extend some of our earlier research. Specifically, we use historical data from Maddison to confirm a link between political institutions and propensity to experience large swings in growth. We also study the role of institutions and macroeconomic policies, such as inflation, openness to trade, size of government, and real exchange rate overvaluation, in the context of growth transitions. We find surprisingly complex effects of some policies. For example, trade makes fast growth more likely but also increases the frequency of crises. The size of government reduces the likelihood of fast miracle-like growth while at the same time limiting the risk of stagnation. Moreover, these effects are nonlinear and dependent on the quality of institutions. We conclude by highlighting potentially promising areas for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a more robust empirical support for the long established postulation by Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter that human capital and institutions enable Schumpeterian entrepreneurship, which, in turn, facilitates economic growth.

Adopting entrepreneurial orientation (EO) (i.e. innovativeness, proactiveness and risk taking; Mthanti and Ojah, 2017, Research Policy, 46:4, pp. 724-739) as the measure of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship at the macro-level, and using a sample of 93 countries, over 1980-2008, the authors employ system Generalised Method of Moments to investigate institutions and human capital as possible determinants of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (EO).

The authors find that the human capital-EO nexus is robust across economic development levels. However, there is a cross-country variation in the institutions-EO nexus. In line with theoretical predictions, institutions indeed drive EO in middle-to-high-income countries. However, in low-income countries, building institutions in order to foster EO yields perverse outcomes, which, for us and especially based on deeper analysis, suggest that improving the quality of institutions may not be a necessary precondition for EO/growth policy in low-income countries. Furthermore, the authors find that EO is a highly persistent series, with self-reinforcing network effects, i.e. lofty EO behaviour encourages more lofty EO behaviour.

Drivers of macro EO are erroneously taken as of growth. This empirical analysis corrects the sequencing.

Policy practice must acknowledge macro-EO importantly has both direct and indirect growth effects.

This study is the first to empirically test the theoretical sequence between drivers of growth/EO and economic growth.

Inspired by the debates among economists about the role of beliefs and informal institutions in economic development, the purpose of this paper is to derive and test different hypotheses about the ways beliefs about the market economy, institutions and policies, and productive entrepreneurship are intertwined.

The paper derives from the literature three hypotheses unified around the idea of (political, cultural, and market) entrepreneurship. The paper then tests these hypotheses by running various country-level regressions intended to check the relationships between formal institutions and policies (measured by World Governance Indicators and by the Economic Freedom of the World index), productive entrepreneurship (measured by total factor productivity form the Penn World Table), and different kinds of market beliefs from the World Values Survey (WVS).

The sociological hypothesis says that more pro-market beliefs provide incentives for innovation by recognizing entrepreneurship as a dignifying activity. The political hypothesis says that people with more pro-market beliefs will demand, and therefore live with, more pro-market institutions and policies. The “Schumpeterian” hypothesis says that it is market institutions that make it possible for entrepreneurs to run against anti-market beliefs, and innovate. The results support the Schumpeterian hypothesis, mainly because market beliefs predict institutions and policies as well as productivity very poorly, while formal institutions and policies make a much better job of this.

The paper contrasts three different hypotheses concerned with the broader consequences of political, cultural, and market entrepreneurship and tests them by making use of the time structure of the observations found in the WVS.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of unemployment and labour institutions such as employment protection legislation, coverage of unemployment benefits, minimum wages (MW), union power and tax wedge on migration flows. The authors allow for interactions of these institutions with migration entry laws, as both affect equilibrium wages and employment in destination countries, influencing mobility decisions of immigrants.

The authors use data on migration flows for a sample of 15 OECD countries over the period 1980-2006. The relationship between flows and labour institutions is analysed using OLS techniques and including destination and origin-by-year fixed effects. The coefficients of interest are identified through within country variation. The authors test the robustness of the results to different specifications using, among others, dynamic models for panel data.

The authors find strong and negative effects of unemployment, employment protection and migration policy on flows. The negative effect of migration policy on flows is larger in countries with high than in countries with low employment protection. The authors find positive effects for MW, unemployment benefits and union power. The authors show heterogeneous effects depending on the group of countries of origin and destination.

While the identification strategy allows us to estimate the effects of interest, the baseline estimates may suffer from endogeneity problems in terms of omitted variable bias and reverse causality. The sensitivity checks provide mixed results and show that baseline estimates are not always robust to different specifications. Further work is needed to better address the problem of endogeneity.

The paper adds to the previous literature on the determinants of immigration flows by explicitly considering the labour market environment in destination countries. The results provide insights into potential interaction effects and coordination of reforms in labour markets and immigration policies.

After the precipitated decline of the Soviet Empire and its satellite states, a system change seemed to be called for, and many countries embarked on social and political reforms focussing on property structures in the economy. This raised the issue of governance in the institutions that would constitute the structures in which production would have to take place. In particular, some Central European countries opted for mass privatisations of the means of production, on the face of it so as to have the people participate in the wealth of the nation. In fact, the wealth of the nation depends on the structures in which it is constituted. Dissipation of property rights will reduce the value of the nation's productive capital, whereas an intelligent structure that creates good governance structures at the same time, increases the value of the producing capital. This relatively simple insight lies at the heart of our understanding of how to analyse different processes of mass privatisation. This essay develops a theoretical framework by which different governance structures can be analysed. The framework consists of a blend of the economic theory of property rights, new institutional economics and Austrian economic theory.