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Objective – The first wave of experiences of exemptions policies suggested that poverty-based exemptions, using individual targeting, were not effective, for practical and political economic reasons. In response, many countries have changed their approach in recent years – while maintaining user fees as a necessary source of revenue for facilities, they have been switching to categorical targeting, offering exemptions based on high-priority services or population groups. This chapter aims to examine the impact and conditions for effectiveness of this recent health finance modality.

Methodology/approach – The chapter is based on a literature review and on data from two complex evaluations of national fee exemption policies for delivery care in West Africa (Ghana and Senegal). A conceptual framework for analysing the impact of exemption policies is developed and used. Although the analysis focuses on exemption for deliveries, the framework and findings are likely to be generalisable to other service- or population-based exemptions.

Findings – The chapter presents background information on the nature of delivery exemptions, the drivers for their use, their scale and common modalities in low-income countries. It then looks at evidence of their impact, on utilisation, quality of care and equity and investigates their cost-effectiveness. The final section presents lessons on implementation and implications for policy-makers, including the acceptability and sustainability of exemptions and how they compare to other possible mechanisms.

Implications for policy – The chapter concludes that funded service- or group-based exemptions offer a simple, potentially effective route to mitigating inequity and inefficiency in the health systems of low-income countries. However, there are a number of key constraints. One is the fungibility of resources at health facility level. The second is the difficulty of sustaining a separate funding stream over the medium to long term. The third is the arbitrary basis for selecting high-priority services for exemption. The chapter therefore concludes that this financing mode is unstable and is likely to be transitional.

The confirmation of receipt of orders by consumers means that the online retailer actually receives the payments on many retail platforms (e.g. Taobao). In order to recoup funds as soon as possible, the retailer will take steps (e.g. improving the level of delivery and adopting a rebate policy) to encourage consumers to confirm receipt earlier. It is significant for the retailer to identify an appropriate strategy and determine the optimal product price. To address the above issues, this paper examines and compares the pricing strategies and profits under different strategies to show some managerial insights for the retailer's decision-making.

In this paper, the authors discuss four models, i.e. adopting common delivery and offering consumers no rebates, adopting common delivery and offering rebates, adopting fast delivery and offering no rebates and adopting fast delivery and offering rebates, which the retailer may consider. Under different models, consumer utility and firm's profit structure are disparate. After comparing the retailer's profits under four models, the optimal strategy, profit and product price are obtained.

Some interesting results are as follows. When the cost of fast delivery is not very high, improving the level of delivery would bring more profit to the retailer and create a positive impact on consumers. Interestingly, our results also show that offering proper rebates to stimulate consumers to confirm receipt early only serves to improve the profit only when the motivation of consumers to confirm the receipt is very low. Moreover, the authors find that a higher level of delivery services can promote the implementation of the rebate policy to improve the retailer's earnings.

This paper is the first study on the transaction mode of retail platforms and the problem of confirming receipt by a model-based method.

Organizing entrepreneurship policy efforts is not an easy task. There are often several different actors involved, and their efforts towards improving conditions for entrepreneurs may be more or less organized. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the organizational archetypes of local entrepreneurship policy, across a number of factors relating to coordination mechanisms and outsourcing.

The study is based on a survey of 77 Danish municipalities, covering 79 per cent of the total population, and their entrepreneurship policy structures. A two-step cluster analysis has been performed to identify taxonomies of entrepreneurship policy organizations.

The findings reveal four different clusters: arm’s length coordination; arm’s length decoupling; internal centralization; and arm’s length centralization. Moreover the study reveals a link between these archetypes and the effectiveness of the local entrepreneurship policy delivery structure, suggesting that some structures may be more effective than other.

The paper shifts the focus from policy formulation to organization, showing the importance of organizational structure for better performance. Specifically, the paper illustrates how lack of reaction to the environment leads to underperformance. Moreover, the paper draws the attention towards these new taxonomies, which are of value not only to academia but also to the political world.

Assembly systems require uninterrupted components' availability to feed workstations. This paper aims to propose a methodology to help managers in evaluating and selecting the most suitable policy for materials delivery to the shop floor. The analysis focuses on three basic policies, namely kitting, just in time kanban‐based continuous supply and line storage, even including class‐based hybrid policies.

Descriptive models are developed to design components' delivery systems and to compute their performances. Empirical criteria are utilized to associate specific policies to components classes in order to implement customized hybrid line feeding policies. A case study is then included to exemplify the method application and to show its capabilities as a decision making tool.

Hybrid feeding policies may be preferable to a single feeding policy common to all components. This is shown in a representative case study. However, in general there is a priori superior method and only a comparison of alternative feeding policies based on objective performance measures can determine the best approach in specific industrial applications.

The methodology is aimed at preliminary sizing and selection of alternative line feeding systems in deterministic environments. It is not intended for detailed performance analysis of assembly systems.

Production managers are given quantitative decision tools to properly select the components' delivery method at an early decision stage. This allows trade‐offs between alternatives to be explored in order to deploy customized feeding policies differentiated on components basis to better fit specific company requirements.

The paper extends previous descriptive models for line feeding systems and includes the possibility of hybrid policies.

In the UK regions that are structurally more vulnerable are less able to respond to economic shocks (McCann, 2017). An economic downturn for a poorer region like the North East of England (Jenkins, Pike, & Tomaney, 2019) will mean it enters recession earlier and emerges from recession later than significantly wealthier regions like London and South East region in England or Amsterdam City region in the Netherlands. We ask, what can be done to improve the impact of policy interventions that support and develop weaker regional economies? Behind this chapter sit two elements of research study: a question, which asks, what if you develop a “great” policy, that is well researched and designed; however, it fails because the people who deliver it don’t have the right culture, values, or knowledge? The second element is that the authors are interested in a range of factors that affect not only policy implementation including entrepreneurship but also economic culture and social capital, looking at the problem from different disciplinary viewpoints (Baker & Welter, 2018). This chapter makes a comparative study between the North East of England and the Amsterdam City region to explore how policy implementation might be improved as other factors of place cannot be easily altered, these factors include major infrastructure, political systems, and budgetary control as well as overall economic wealth. What this means is that practical research and studies have to find factors that can be improved in order to achieve change and a greater economic impact on Places in this context, the North East of England.

The aim of this paper is to analyse enterprise policy in the United Kingdom (UK), in relation to decisions about policy, policy delivery, entrepreneurial practice and academic/consultative research.

The paper offers and discusses a conceptual framework for analysis of the actors, decisions, and issues involved in enterprise policy‐making and policy delivery alongside the interests of the businesses they seek to serve and the academics who provide research support – to shed new light on the UK Government's challenge in satisfying its stated remit.

It considers whether an all‐embracing enterprise strategy – with clear ownership and shared commitment – is a realistic alternative to the more piecemeal approach we have experienced in the past. The issues are grounded in key lessons from systems and strategy to assess their relevance to the debate.

The change of government in the UK in 2010, the first change for 13 years, makes this debate apposite and the relevant issues discussed are an important challenge for the new coalition.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of tiers of governance and discuss the findings from research into a crime policy's implementation focusing on resourcing, community engagement, accountability and leadership. The paper examines the shift from partnership delivery to the Big Society.

18 in-depth semi-structured interviews with partnership managers from a range of organisations combined with non-participant semi-structured of ten partnership meetings and documentary analysis were undertaken, in tandem with the policy networks framework.

Despite the expectations placed on crime partnerships by New Labour, governance has continued to be driven by professionals and dominated by the large public sector organisations, rather than the community they serve or their service users, and with little involvement from the business sector in delivery. The focus upon voluntarism, enterprise and business in the Big Society vision will mean rapid adaptation in the sector if it is to fit the Big Society agenda successfully.

The paper serves to set out the relationships between key actors in governance in this policy area and the relevance of this to the Big Society idea. Its findings and lessons can be used to compare the policy sector across countries and for practical use by policy makers.

Performance regimes attempt to bring policy development, service delivery and public assurance into a mutually supportive, coherent and joined-up approach. This chapter sets out a dynamic conceptual model that illustrates how the different parts of performance regimes are configured and how the individual parts interrelate with each other. It identifies the activities relevant to the three core domains of policy development, service delivery and public assurance and shows how they relate to situational and contextual factors, as well as the principle values and behaviour by which public service is conducted in the United Kingdom. This model forms the basis for the evaluations of the specific reforms in the following three chapters.

There are a number of traditional business strategy theories that have been used to discuss business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐commerce strategy: Transaction Cost Economics, Resource‐Based View, Porter’s Market Forces Theory, and Channel Theory. However, there currently exists no comprehensive framework linking these theories into a method to rigorously assess value delivery strategies, and in particular to determine how to maximise the impact of the Internet as a value delivery channel. This paper answers this shortcoming by introducing a framework that draws together the main theories of strategic choice in a systematic fashion. In particular, the paper examines how different ways of delivering the same form of value (rather than particular products) from producer to customer may allow exploitation of the desirable features of the Internet to different degrees. By using a novel distribution business model from a real‐life case study to illustrate this framework, the paper uncovers several novel ways the Internet can enhance B2B strategy. The main contribution of the paper is the development of a formal, semi‐quantitative model of value delivery strategy evaluation, which can be used as a starting point for practical evaluation of strategy choices in particular settings, and also as a theoretical tool for discussing the role of the Internet in B2B e‐commerce in a more rigorous way.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Communities First, an area‐based regeneration policy in Wales to explore the barriers to community empowerment. Three related research projects provide data to inform the discussion of community empowerment and to consider the implications of delivery of the policy for theorising the relationship between the citizen and the state as mediated through regeneration partnerships.

Data from three related research projects are discussed. These are an evaluation of local delivery of the Communities First programme, the delivery of technical support to participating communities and a Joseph Rowntree‐funded case study of nine regeneration partnerships. All projects are concerned with exploring the experience of community members within regeneration partnerships.

The findings identify major barriers to the achievement of community empowerment including issues of community capacity, institutional capacity, organisational cultures and regulatory frameworks. The findings identify mechanisms for improving community participation and empowerment. The findings are also used to identify community actor agency within regeneration partnerships and to argue against an analysis of regeneration initiatives as a mechanism of social control and incorporation of community activism into a state led agenda.

The paper explores one specific policy within a UK devolved region and is not able to comment extensively on similar policy programmes in other areas of the UK. However, it uses this specific experience to comment on generic issues in the community empowerment field and to elaborate theory on the relationship between the citizen and the state.

The paper offers practitioners and policy makers insight into the community experience of participation in regeneration partnerships and proposes methods and policy refinements which can improve empowerment outcomes and assist community participation to achieve higher levels of influence over statutory partners.

While the paper identifies barriers to empowerment that are recognised in the wider literature, it demonstrates that such barriers can prevail even within a highly participative policy framework such as Communities First. The paper also provides evidence of a clear sense of agency on the part of community members of regeneration partnerships and counters models which suggest regeneration partnerships are simple mechanisms of social control which diffuse community activism.