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The purpose of this article is to analyse the weaknesses of governance institutions in constraining grand corruption arising from the government procurement of large foreign-funded infrastructure projects in the Philippines. The weaknesses are revealed in the description and analysis of two major scandals, namely, the construction of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant during the Marcos era and the National Broadband Network project of the Arroyo presidency.

This research employs a historical and comparative case approach to explore patterns of grand corruption and their resolution. Primary and secondary data sources including court decisions, congressional records, journal articles and newspaper reports are used to construct the narratives for each case.

Top-level executive agreements that do not require competitive public bidding provide an opportunity for grand corruption. Such agreements encourage the formation of corrupt rent-seeking relationships involving the selling firm, brokers, politicians and top-level government executives. Closure of cases of grand corruption is a serious problem that involves an incoherent and politically vulnerable prosecutorial and justice system.

This paper aims to contribute to research on grand corruption involving the executive branch in the Philippines, particularly in the procurement of large, foreign-funded government projects. It examines allegations of improprieties in government project contracting and the politics of resolving corruption scandals through the justice system.

This article aims to identify management practices that evidence how internal control have been considered essential, from the edition of the State Constitutional Amendment no. 75 of 2012, within the public administration of the executive branch of the State of Ceará, during the period 2012–2021.

The study relates the identified management practices to COSO (The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations) methodology “Internal Environment” component categories. The research is classified as basic, exploratory and bibliographic, on the theme of internal control in scientific articles published between 2015 and 2021, and documental, carried out through official documents, including the 27 Brazilian constitutions.

Existence of management practices that corroborate the essentiality of internal control in Ceará.

The study is limited to evidencing the control practices implemented in Ceará, not evaluating them as to their quality.

Contributions on control on constitutional-legal bases for other Brazilian Federation States.

Possibility of introducing the research theme into various branches of scientific knowledge, such as political science and contributing to public organizations to implement policies with the proper application of resources for the benefit of society.

The originality of the research is in demonstrating the essentiality of internal control in the State of Ceará, from the edition of management acts performed by the executive branch, based on Constitutional Amendment 75 of 2012, which did not become a dead letter of the law, enabling other states of the federation to do the same.

The purpose is to share strategies, rationales and lessons learnt from user involvement in a quality and safety improvement research project from the practice field in nursing homes and homecare services.

This is a viewpoint paper summarizing how researchers and co-researchers from the practice field of nursing homes and homecare services (nurse counsellors from different municipalities, patient ombudsman and next-of-kin representatives/and elderly care organization representant) experienced user involvement through all phases of the research project. The project included implementation of a leadership intervention.

Multiple strategies of user involvement were applied during the project including partnership in the consortium, employment of user representatives (co-researchers) and user-led research activities. The rationale was to ensure sound context adaptation of the intervention and development of tailor-made activities and tools based on equality and mutual trust in the collaboration. Both university-based researchers and Co-researchers experienced it as useful and necessary to involve or being involved in all phases of the research project, including the designing, planning, intervention implementation, evaluation and dissemination of results.

User involvement in research is a growing field. There is limited focus on this aspect in quality and safety interventions in nursing homes and homecare settings and in projects focussing on the leadership' role in improving quality and safety.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about workplace diversity and equality in an under-researched country. Focusing on the south-eastern European transition economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), it elaborates on the country’s legislation, public debate and previous research in the field.

The paper draws on a synopsis of the legislative framework, existing literature, public media and personal communications with human resource (HR) practitioners.

There is only limited research on diversity and equality in BiH. Ethnicity and gender are the most common grounds for discrimination. Although a solid body of legislation addressing anti-discrimination and equality issues exists, implementation is insufficient. The public debate tends to reinforce inter-ethnic conflicts and a negative atmosphere regarding sexual minority rights.

Due to the general lack of research on diversity and equality in BiH, the findings presented in this paper only can serve as a first approximation of the topic. Further academic research on concrete business practices and perspectives of HR managers is needed.

Firms not only need to increase compliance with anti-discrimination law, but they should also focus more on the benefits a multi-ethnic society can offer.

This is the first paper in the management literature that provides comprehensive insight into workplace diversity and equality in BiH.

Swedish society has systematically worked to improve children's health and well-being since the early twentieth century and is considered a leading figure globally in battling violence against children. Awareness of violence against children and its detrimental effects on development and health is generally high in Sweden. Violence is also broadly recognised as a violation of human rights. A ban on corporal punishment was enacted in 1948 in social childcare institutions, in 1958 in schools, and in 1979 at home. The more recent landmark was the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, established as law on 1 January 2020. In line with convention's Article 12, stating that a child has the right to express their views in all matters affecting them, more attention to child participation has been paid since 2020. This chapter provides several recent examples of strategic measures that have been used to enhance child participation in governmental assignments and enquiries and state-funded research. We discuss the examples considering the United Nations convention and child participation methods and pinpoint opportunities and obstacles to further develop and consolidate child participation as a norm in publicly funded societal activities.

This paper analyses the importance of leadership and culture in combating corruption in Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.

This paper is based on the comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption measures in the studies of six selected countries/regions in this special issue of Public Administration and Policy. The contributors in this special issue were invited because of their publications on combating corruption in the six countries/regions.

The critical variable ensuring the effectiveness of combating corruption is the strong political will of the leadership in changing the culture of corruption in the country/region by implementing a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption, as shown in Singapore and Hong Kong. In New Zealand’s case, leadership plays a less important role because of the population’s emphasis on equality and egalitarianism and its reliance on the Ombudsman and Serious Fraud Office to curb corruption. However, the corrupt leadership of Tanaka Kakuei in Japan, Najib Rajak in Malaysia, and Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan, demonstrates clearly their insidious impact of consolidating their kleptocratic rule in these countries/regions.

As the role of leadership and culture in combating corruption has not been given sufficient attention in the literature, this paper attempts to rectify this neglect by demonstrating that the political leaders in Singapore and Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, New Zealand, have succeeded in minimising corruption while their counterparts in Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, have failed to do so.

Children’s voices are seldom heard directly. Most often, children, particularly young children, are represented by adults acting on their behalf who may or may not best represent the child’s views or best interests. This can be beneficial or problematic, if the child’s needs are not appreciated or recognised. This chapter looks at the changing attitudes to listening to young people, and the growing recognition of the value of children’s needs, as well as the growing voices of the children themselves, who make their needs increasingly clear. The results of our Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) interviews with children and young people via the DIPEx International organisation give us clear direction as to the importance children using primary care services place on being taken seriously, being listened to and being able to make their own decisions. Other researchers asked input from primary care professionals on children’s autonomy and how the current and future primary care systems can best address the needs of young people, as well as the placing of these issues in a wider cultural context, and how this influences and is influenced by children’s choices. Finally, we look at how the MOCHA country agents have reported the assessment of the importance and function of listening to young people in our research.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the five mistakes made by political leaders in Asian countries in combating corruption. These mistakes constitute the cycle of failure which must be broken for Asian countries to succeed in fighting corruption.

This paper is based on the comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption measures adopted by various Asian countries.

The cycle of failure in combating corruption in Asian countries arises from their governments’ reliance on corrupt political leaders and the police, and multiple anti-corruption agencies as attack dogs or paper tigers.

This paper would be of interest to those policymakers, anti-corruption practitioners, and scholars, who are concerned with enhancing the effectiveness of anti-corruption strategies in their countries by breaking the cycle of failure.

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of public attitude on petty corruption.

This is a survey study on customers of a licenses providing authority (N = 390) in Cairo, Egypt. The authors use Akers social learning theory of crime and deviance and take into consideration criticisms of it. The authors control for individual and organizational level determinants that are identified by scholars as influencing people's attitudes toward corruption and which could be known through the authority customers' experiences. Because the dependent variable is binary, whether a person paid a bribe during last transaction with this authority or not, the authors use binary logistic regression.

The findings indicate that people are more likely to engage in petty corruption when they see it as acceptable, have previous petty corruption experience and when they use a mediator. Also, of those who dealt with that civil service authority during and directly after the 25th of January Revolution (N = 161) 31% reported that they did not engage in petty corruption in comparison to previous years. They referred this to a change in attitude at the time.

The policy implications of the research are important. Social science theories could generate cultural and policy relevant solutions for petty corruption; however, they have not been taken full advantage of. Also, experience-based country-specific corruption survey studies are important input for an effective anti-corruption policy.