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The purpose of this paper is to explore inter-organizational interactions that might result in prolonged decoupling between central governments' ideas and local governments' practices during the reform of an institutional field (i.e. healthcare).

The paper is based on a qualitative study of the centrally directed reform of the healthcare financing system in Ukraine and focusses on practices and reform ideas from 1991 to 2016.

The findings show that, for more than 25 years, local governments, as providers of healthcare services, faced two major problems associated with drawbacks of the healthcare financial system: line-item budgeting and fragmentation of healthcare funds. Over 25 years, central government's attempts to reform the healthcare financing system did not comprehensively or systematically address the stated problems. The reformers' ideas seemed to focus on creating reform agendas and issuing new laws, instead of paying attention to challenges in local practices.

This article has two main points that are relevant for practitioners. First, it calls for greater involvement from local actors during all stages of public sector reforms, in order to ensure the relevance of developed reform strategies. Second, it points to potential challenges that central governments may face when conducting healthcare financing system reforms in transitional economies.

The paper's contribution is twofold: it outlines reasons for problematic implementation of healthcare financing system reform in Ukraine and explains them through a “reverse decoupling” concept.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Brazilian municipalities are losing efficiency when collecting local taxes in response to oil windfalls. In particular, the paper aims to analyze the hypothesis that these grants encourage the benefiting municipalities to collect taxes with excessive administrative costs.

The author estimate a stochastic cost frontier with fixed effects and investigate whether oil revenues impact on the efficiency scores.

The results reveal that the municipalities benefitting from oil revenues (royalties) reduce their efficiency in collecting taxes in response to such grants, which signals that they generate some type of X-inefficiency in municipal public management.

The stochastic cost frontier requires the calculation of input prices for public sector.

Using a cost frontier, it is possible to avoid the problem of mixing technical efficiency with unobservable preferences on public goods, as well as to focus on economic efficiency instead of technical one.

Building on perspectives from the study of multilevel governance, migrants' inclusion and emergency management, this article asks how differences across national regulations for foreign residents, work eligibility and access to national emergency supports intersected with local approaches in responding to migrants.

This article examines national policy adjustments and parallel subnational governance early in the pandemic for three groups of foreign residents: international students, technical interns and co-ethnics with long-term visas, primarily Brazilians and Peruvians. It uses Japanese-language documents to trace national policy responses. To grasp subnational governance, the article analyzes coverage in six Japanese regional newspapers from northern, central and western Japan, for the period of April 1 to October 1, 2020.

National policies obstructed or enabled migrants' treatment as members of the local community but did not dictate this membership, which varied according to migrant group. Migrants' relationship to the community affected available supports.

The article brings together perspectives on multilevel governance, emergency management and migrants' inclusion. It exposes how different migrant groups' ties to the local community affected access to supports.

This study aims to explore the dissemination and evolutionary path of online public opinion from a crisis management perspective. By clarifying the influencing factors and dynamic mechanisms of online public opinion dissemination, this study provides insights into attenuating the negative impact of online public opinion and creating a favorable ecological space for online public opinion.

This research employs bibliometric analysis and CiteSpace software to analyze 302 Chinese articles published from 2006 to 2023 in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database and 276 English articles published from 1994 to 2023 in the Web of Science core set database. Through literature keyword clustering, co-citation analysis and burst terms analysis, this paper summarizes the core scientific research institutions, scholars, hot topics and evolutionary paths of online public opinion crisis management research from both Chinese and international academic communities.

The results show that the study of online public opinion crisis management in China and internationally is centered on the life cycle theory, which integrates knowledge from information, computer and system sciences. Although there are differences in political interaction and stage evolution, the overall evolutionary path is similar, and it develops dynamically in the “benign conflict” between the expansion of the research perspective and the gradual refinement of research granularity.

This study summarizes the research results of online public opinion crisis management from China and the international academic community and identifies current research hotspots and theoretical evolution paths. Future research can focus on deepening the basic theories of public opinion crisis management under the influence of frontier technologies, exploring the subjectivity and emotionality of web users using fine algorithms and promoting the international development of network public opinion crisis management theory through transnational comparison and international cooperation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the implications of inter-governmental relations on procurement compliance in local government.

A total of 68 in-depth interviews with local government officials and councillors in four different local government authorities, members of parliament in the local authorities accounts committee and a committee clerk were carried out in addition to documentary review.

Evidences from in-depth interviews and documentary analysis point to central government as one of key reasons for procurement non-compliance. The nature of inter-governmental relations enables the central government to issue encroaching directives on local government procurement plans or take handicapping actions on the financial ability of the local governments to execute procurement plans.

The study adds inter-governmental relations on strategies for improving procurement compliance in African local government systems.

Despite increasing research on procurement compliance, the complexity of regulatory non-compliance in local government procurement has not been adequately analysed. The current study uses an inter-governmental relations perspective to contribute knowledge on procurement compliance in local government systems of the Third World, sub-Saharan Africa in particular.

Drawing on network and fiscal federalism theories, we investigated central government patronage and donor aid as antecedents of budget performance in local government (LG). A mixed methods design with data collected from 18 LGs, two ministries, and four donor agencies in Uganda was employed. Results revealed that both central government patronage and donor aid predict budget performance. Moreover, autonomy does not mediate the interactions as initially hypothesized. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and future research direction is provided.

Co‐operation between governments on scientific and technical information is normally at three levels: the development of national policies, the creation or improvement of systems and services, and the establishment and acceptance of standards for systems and services. Regional organizations such as the European Economic Community and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance can be interested in all three; the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development is primarily interested in the first; specialist organizations such as the European Space Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Food and Agricultural Organization are mainly interested in the second, though they can contribute to the third; Unesco is primarily concerned with the first and third and in technical assistance. In promoting co‐operation each organization seeks to benefit its members, who are of limited number in the regional organizations and in OECD but are world wide in the UN agencies and therefore composed mainly of developing countries.