Search results

Drawing on the results of the previous chapters, this chapter looks at current progress in terms of climate disaster risk incorporation into development planning and practice at three levels (national government, municipalities, and communities) and analyzes gaps, challenges, and opportunities. The chapter also discusses potential factors for enhancing local disaster risk management (DRM) capacity by collaborating with three levels of stakeholders.

This study explores whether hard regulatory control decreases the level of earnings management in local governments. The implementation of a new regulatory approach by Norwegian authorities provides the opportunity for an empirical study.

The authors adopt a two-stage strategy to investigate the existence of earnings management, using the Jones (1991) and modified Jones (Dechow et al., 1995) models to construct a random-effects model.

The authors test the hypothesis that, given decentralisation of control, there will be an increase in opportunistic financial reporting. This study's findings suggest that this is not the case, thereby indicating that a soft control regime does not diminish discipline in municipalities.

This study has practical implications for policymaking in the public sector. Its findings suggest that municipalities do not engage in more earnings management under a soft regulatory regime. Hence, other authorities should consider adopting a soft regulatory approach to controlling local governments and their financial reporting systems.

This study contributes to a growing body of literature regarding earnings management by local governments. The authors investigate a hypothesis previously untested in the literature by comparing the degree of earnings management under different regulatory control regimes.

Accountability and financial transparency came to be accepted as the basic principles in obtaining and using public resources in an efficient and productive manner. One of the most important tools to realize this goal is the annual report, also referred to in Public Financial Management and Control Law. Annual reports are comprehensive reports that also contain the realization outcomes according to the performance indicators that pertain to the activities that these institutions implement according to their strategic plan and performance program. The authors explain the reasons of variations from the plans, and also contain the administrative and financial information on the institution. The contribution of the annual reports, in presenting a transparent and accountable structure by enabling efficiency and productivity in municipalities that use a major part of public resources, is undeniable.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the financial and performance information within the annual reports issued by the municipalities of Turkey within the scope of accountability and to reveal the present condition from the results of this evaluation. In short, this study investigates to which degree the municipalities enlighten their stakeholders from the aspect of financial information via annual reports. Within the scope of the study, annual reports of metropolitan municipalities for the year 2017 and 2018 were obtained and the presence of several considerations, defined according to the extent of the financial and performance information they provide and their manner of presentation, were checked.

Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a technical recession doesn’t mean that citizens and local governments were not subject to some of the measures associated with post-GFC austerity. In particular, intergovernmental grants – an important source of revenue for Australian local governments – were frozen by the federal government seeking to mitigate large deficits over the forward estimates. This chapter compares and contrasts the budgetary outcomes for the local governments of Australia’s two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria. We find that the disparate regulatory controls in the two municipal jurisdictions were strongly associated with the budgetary outcomes of the individual municipalities: In particular, we present evidence which suggests that taxation limitations and lax investment guidelines in New South Wales can be associated with relatively inferior budgetary positions and higher budgetary volatility. By way of contrast, Victorian councils had the flexibility to vary rates of taxation to the changing conditions and largely avoided investment losses associated with the financial failure of Lehman Brothers. In New South Wales the regulatory response to deteriorating municipal budgets (subsequent to the GFC) has been to execute a radical programme of forced amalgamations. Somewhat ironically, the Victorian state government has recently imposed taxation limitations on its municipalities. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the saliency of regulatory constraints on municipal resilience, in the context of post-GFC economic challenges.

In this chapter, the development of financial sustainability and resilience in Swedish local governments is analysed. We analyse four Swedish municipalities, where we have interviewed top managers and co-workers. As a complement, we have examined the municipalities’ strategic plans, budget documents and annual reports. We also contextualise this analysis with other findings from local government research during this time, as well as with central government initiatives. In summary, we examine why Swedish municipalities in general remained strong after the financial crisis by showing how they strengthened their anticipatory and coping capacities over time – something that, in the cases of this chapter, was achieved before the 2008/2009 crisis in response to previous crises, rather than because of it. We also show that this is not the only reason. As Swedish finances were comparatively stable, and the problems of the banking sector relatively small, the financial shocks to the municipalities could be overcome relatively easily.

The policy for spatial organization considers three levels: the first is the distribution between the rural and urban populations, the second is the distribution of the urban population between the metropolitan region and the interior, and the third is the spatial organization of the urban population in the interior.

The 2008 economic and financial crisis has particularly hit Italy, forcing governments to cope with unprecedented shocks affecting their financial conditions. Drawing on the resilience concept, the chapter aims to investigate what capacities are deployed and developed by Italian local governments to respond to such shocks. Based on a multiple case study, it explores the role of organisational features and capacities, as well as the characteristics of the external environment, in affecting responses and the related results. From the analysis it emerges that different capacities have been deployed by Italian municipalities to anticipate and cope with financial shocks in recent years, leading to four main patterns of financial resilience: proactive and internally driven, fatalist, constrained and contented resilience. The contribution highlights that simply relying on (past) wealthy conditions, or accumulating resources, is not sufficient for coping with shocks. By contrast, it emphasises the importance of investing on anticipating the consequences of negative events.

Despite the abundant literature on CSR, the implementation of social responsibility in public sector organizations is still underexplored. And this despite the fact that, as illustration, the public sector accounts for more than one-third of the economic activity in Belgium. Moreover, public sector organizations have an example function toward other societal actors, and by implementing social responsibility themselves, they are likely to provide a strong signal to the market. In this chapter, we approach the example role of public organizations in CSR implementation by doing a qualitative research of 14 (out of 19) municipalities in Brussels and focus thereby on the implementation of a social responsibility proxy, “Local Agenda 21” (LA21). We find that political support, through key political figures and the opposition, are very important for the success of the implementation of social responsibility in municipalities. We were surprised to learn that municipalities are experiencing competition amongst each other regarding LA21 implementation. However, the most unexpected result of our study was that municipalities reported that their involvement in LA21 seems to have only a limited impact on the private sector. Therefore, the argument of government institutions “leading by example” requires further investigation.

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether Mayors in Portugal engage in earnings management close to zero with the motivation of re-election.

The data used in this study were annual financial information from Portuguese municipalities from 2005 to 2016, as well as data on elections and Mayor re-elections involving three political cycles. The methodologies employed were quantitative, including graphical and panel data regressions.

The results indicate that municipalities used discretionary accruals to engage in earnings management to report net earnings close to zero, and re-election seems to be a motivation for earnings management behaviour. Furthermore, the results suggest that municipalities in which the Mayor is re-elected are less likely to report positive net earnings close to zero.

This paper makes a valuable contribution to the literature on earnings management in municipalities. At the theoretical level, it makes it possible to identify whether re-election is a motivation for earnings management and, in this sense, to identify patterns of behaviour by managers. On a practical level, the knowledge of a manager's behaviour patterns will help to anticipate his or her future behaviour and, consequently, may prevent inefficiencies.