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The purpose of this paper is to understand the enduring, fundamental contributions of accounting practices in the pursuit of decentralization by governments, with an examination of Peter Leopold’s reform of the municipalities in the late eighteenth century in Italy.

An extensive textual analysis of the very comprehensive collection of primary sources of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany during the de’ Medici and Hapsburg-Lorraine’s rule identified the reasons for Peter Leopold’s decision to decentralize his government’s authority and responsibilities. A systemic comparison of the 1765–1766 and 1775–1776 financial reports of the Municipality of Castrocaro and Terra del Sole disclosed the importance of the micro-practices of accounting and reporting for the reform.

In the context of the eighteenth century enlightenment, Peter Leopold legitimized his reform by the introduction of a modern style of government based on the rationalization of the municipal administrative system and decentralization of central authority and responsibility. The reform was made feasible by the substitution of a birth right principle with an economic discourse which linked tax payments to property ownership. This had the unintended consequence of increased taxes, higher municipal expenditures and possible inequalities between municipalities.

The findings of the study are dependent on the resources which have survived and are now preserved in the official archives of Galeata and Florence. This work contributes to the extant literature on administrative reforms in a crucial period for the redefinition of sovereignty by the ruling classes, with the rise of the modern State. It extends historical understanding of the public sector with a focus on local government in the eighteenth century in a non-Anglo-Saxon context.

The examination of the reform of Peter Leopold contributes to an enhanced understanding of present-day decentralization by governments in the context of the new public management (NPM). It provides to NPM advocates a broader temporal and contextual understanding of the impact of current decentralization reforms.

Few accounting studies have considered the micro-aspects of decentralization reforms at the municipal level and tried to identify their impact on the wealth of the population. Moreover, Peter Leopold’s reform is considered one of the most innovative and enlightened of the eighteenth century, while the remainder of Europe was still overwhelmingly committed to the centralization of administrative apparatuses. Finally, this study relates to the multi-disciplinary debate about the recognition, qualification and accountization of the impact of decentralization of responsibility for the delivery of government services.

Value capture seeks to generate revenue by extracting a portion of the gains in the value of land and property that result from improvements to transportation networks. The paper aims to present the opportunities for facilities management (FM) on the level of participating more actively in the development of new area to help building a competitive and healthy area with high quality for residence, business and spare time. A framework also includes life period land valuation in the land value capture (LVC) for the assessment and revenue models for public private partnership (PPP) type of investments in the way to identify additional private profit so as to attract landlords to join the project.

Land valuation for expropriation is a useful method, which can be evaluated through the life period of the infrastructure. The value capture strategies are identified and respective policies are evaluated. Periodically, market value assessment of land within the value capture model is designed, by which the private partners could be attracted.

In the paper, LVC shows how the relation to increase value of land can bring competitive areas and as such give new opportunity for FM.

Capturing land value and widening the internalisation of external positive impacts enhances the perspective of project assessment and PPP financing models. This model may be used by public and private sector parties involved in PPP arrangements to improve project evaluation and the base of project finance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of health‐related needs on a policy design and curriculum enactment basis in terms of the national school health education curriculum in Greek secondary education.

A single case study, using an ethnographic approach, was conducted in Greece, seeking to understand the continuum from policy design to curriculum enactment in respect of health‐related needs. Three sources of data were used to meet this goal: policy texts, observation, and interviews. Multilevel sampling was employed to select one secondary school as a site for “good practice”. Grounded theory coding, thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis identified themes associated with the idea of health‐related through the corpus of data.

On a policy plan level the concept of health‐related needs was coupled with and reduced to a predetermined list of health‐related subjects; and the list of health‐related topics had not been updated for long and was characterised by a rather biomedical orientation. On a school practice level the stage of needs assessment was not applied, the list of health‐related subjects advocated in the policy plan was used on a proactive, normative and top down basis, and the students' felt needs tended to be disregarded.

This study followed up the continuum from policy design to school practice regarding the concept and practice of health needs, highlighting the possibilities and the problems from both perspectives.

The world is facing serious global food security challenges such as the need for sufficient food for a growing population and an exponential growth in nutrient deficiency disorders. Agricultural biotechnology, such as genetically modified (GM) crops, offers itself as a promising solution to address one or more of these issues. Golden Rice (GR) is an example of a GM crop which contains high amount of β-carotene, a compound which is an antioxidant and a precursor of vitamin A. In spite of GR’s promised potential benefits in combating vitamin A deficiency (VAD) disorders it is still not cultivated. This viewpoint paper aims to present the reader with a need for multidisciplinary research agenda, the outcomes of which can contribute towards the acceptance of GR.

This viewpoint paper is based on an extensive literature review to identify the “gaps” which contributed to low acceptance of GR. This paper presents a systematic discussion on the importance of GR in tackling VAD and discusses controversies around GR and a scientific approach to tackle them.

The literature review clearly indicates that there is a huge gap in information substantiating the potential of GR for consumers as well as for the farming community. Addressing these issues can substantially increase the acceptance and cultivation of GR. This viewpoint paper proposes food technologists’ and social scientists’ research agenda for GR and further indicates how the involvement of other research disciplines can improve the acceptance of GR.

The literature review indicates the potential of GR in tackling VAD disorders but clearly lacks information to substantiate these arguments. This paper presents authors’ opinions, urging scientists to take up a multidisciplinary research approach to emancipate GR from the clutches of GM food controversies.

During my early years as a junior high school librarian, I was frequently beseiged with requests for heart‐throbbing love stories and mysteries. However, as the years passed and the divorce rate increased, I began to encounter students who specifically asked for books about “mean stepparents” or “families where there are problems.” I initially wondered whether these new entreaties emanated from a small minority or from a more substantial cross‐section of the school population. Several well‐received book talks concerning the impact of divorce and a few discreet inquiries regarding the number of single‐parent families at my school convinced me that a general need existed.

This study aims to develop and test a methodical approach to assessing the effectiveness of business models in fast fashion.

The approach allows one to identify the key features of companies' adaptation strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper analyzes the economic profitability of the fast-fashion industry and establishes business opportunity trends. The author identifies a set of general characteristics of business related to supply and demand before and during the pandemic crisis. The study relies on descriptive statistics and statistical processing methods, including regression analysis, arithmetic mean and the indicator of market economy dynamics.

The study found that the fast-fashion business model allows companies to adapt to the new market norms because of its dual strategy: demand-driven transparency and supply-driven sustainability, within the logic of consumption. The results indicate that focus on sustainability and transparent stakeholder engagement helps companies to remain relevant in the fashion industry.

The results of the study can be used by general managers of companies, marketers and administrative managers to select strategies and make decisions under the current and future fashion industry demands in markets at different developmental stages.

This study examines how cash and stock bonus compensations influence top executives to allocate a firm's resources to fixed intangible assets investment and the extent to which this relationship is conditional on executives' ownership, firm growth, internal cash flow and leverage.

Using data from 213 non-financial and non-utility UK FTSE 350 firms for the period 2007–2015, generating a total of 1,748 firm-year observations, panel econometric methods are employed to test the authors’ model.

The authors observe that executives' cash bonus compensation positively impacts fixed intangible assets investment. However, executives' stock bonus compensation has a negative and significant influence on fixed intangible assets. The authors further observe that executives either cash bonus or stock bonus crucially invest more in fixed intangible assets when the firm has a growth potential. Also, both cash bonus and stock bonus executives in firms with lower internal cash flow spend less on fixed intangible assets. Similar results are also observed for those stock bonus-motivated executives with an increase in fixed intangible assets for low leverage firms but a decrease for high leverage ones.

A key limitation of this study is its concentration on a single country (United Kingdom). Thus, future studies can expand the focus of this study by looking at it from the perspective of multiple countries.

The practical relevance of the study results is that firms with high growth opportunity in fixed intangible assets activity can use more cash bonus compensation (risk-avoiding incentive) to induce corporate executives to invest more in such activity. This finding is particularly important given the increasing appetite of firms in this knowledge-based economy to create expansion through fixed intangible assets investment. That is, for firms to increase fixed intangible assets investment, this study suggests that executive cash bonus compensation cannot be ignored.

While this paper builds on the classic Q theory of investment literature, it is the first – to the best of the authors’ knowledge – to explore how cash and stock bonus compensations influence top executives to allocate a firm's resources to fixed intangible assets investment and the extent to which this relationship is conditional on executives' ownership, firm growth, internal cash flow and leverage.

Meeting human needs is considered as fundamental to sustainable human settlement. However, in micro level developments particularly in respect of a housing unit, for example, an operational definition of sustainability which will be useful in its practical implementation, has yet to be developed. To address this, the author posits that theories on the relationship between the environment and the person can be taken as a conceptual frame of reference. One of them is the theory of Person-Environment Congruence (PEC). This theory conceptualizes “congruence” as the favourable outcome of the person-environment relationship. Achieving PEC is considered as the most important criteria that supports the concept of housing sustainability. In the context of housing, the author considers that PEC is achieved when the dwelling place can offer its inhabitants a place which meets their basic needs. In order to operationalize this concept in terms of housing unit design, the author propagates the use of the Means-End Chain (MEC) research model to explore the relationship between a person and his or her environment. The combination of the two concepts facilitates the identification of those housing attributes emphasized in the home-making process, together with the users' perceptual orientation towards those attributes. To experiment with the application of the MEC research model in respect of exploring the concept of PEC, a case study was conducted on 15 renovated and personalized houses in a mass housing scheme in Malaysia. The traditional MEC methods were maintained with some modifications to accommodate the various housing characteristics. The results suggest that the MEC research model is able to link the relevant housing unit attributes to user values, and it is potentially applicable in the design of a housing unit. The results also indicated that user participation is essential in home making process, in order to achieve and maintain sustainability.

We document the emergence of the Lead Independent Director (LID) board role in a sample of U.S. firms from 1999–2015. We find that firms that adopt an LID board role are larger and have more independent boards, higher institutional investor holdings, and an NYSE listing. Firms with greater anticipated benefits from monitoring also adopt an LID role, e.g., firms with dual CEO-Chairman, with more takeover defense mechanisms, and with higher cash holdings. Using an event study methodology, we find that investors respond positively to the adoption of an LID board role. Lastly, using instrumental variables to address endogeneity in the LID board role, we find that firms with an LID are more likely to terminate poorly performing CEOs. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that the LID board role enhances firm value and improves the quality of corporate governance.

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