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Port competition attracted much scholarly attention in Northwest Europe during the 1980s. Following the rise of powerful economies in East Asia, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, port competition has become an important phenomenon with the top five container ports in the world being located in the region. This paper aims to overview major port competition issues and outlines and analyzes the main alternative methodologies that researchers have employed to address them, referring to 70 items, mostly papers but including a few books and reports

The paper traces the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s. It proposes that employee ownership is a function of macro-level contexts and micro-level decisions, with the latter framed and guided by the former. The macro context comprises the regulatory framework and the provision of incentives to adopt employee ownership. The paper shows how the evolution of these has led to a steep increase in employee ownership in the last eight years.

The paper draws on several sources of empirical data to chart the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s and to identify the current features of employee ownership. Two firm-level surveys conducted in 2015 and 2020/21 are supplemented by qualitative case study data collected in the early 1990s. An annual census of all employee-owned firms facilitates a comprehensive overview of the current state of UK employee ownership.

It is found that there has been a steep increase in the number of UK employee-owned firms since 2014 after several decades of uneven growth. This is attributed to the introduction of new incentives and to refinements of the regulatory framework. Over the period, there has been a shift from hybrid employee ownership, combining direct and indirect forms, to indirect ownership associated with the employee ownership trust model.

The paper provides an original history of employee ownership in the UK using rich and unique data, along with the most comprehensive picture of current employee ownership to date.

This paper aims to attempt to empirically investigate the impact of privatization on the performance of central public sector enterprises in India. Further attempt is made to explore whether privatization is a necessary or sufficient condition for improvement of performance of central public sector enterprises.

The scope of the study is limited to financial and operating performance analysis of 206 central public sector enterprises in India. Multiple regression analysis has been used to determine the magnitude and direction of relationship between dependent and independent variables and identify variables other than privatization which affects performance.

The study found that financial and operational performance of firms has improved significantly due to privatization. Further, firm-specific factors and other parallel reforms adopted by enterprises have significantly influenced their performance. The established regression model is highly significant with F-ratio of 31.825 at 99% significance level. The degree of explanation of the model is robust with adjusted R² at 0.956 implying that only 4.40% of explanation in the dependent variable cannot be explained by designated independent/explanatory variables.

The study would be useful to public policymakers to reach to a policy view on whether further disinvestment/privatization of central public sector enterprises need to be continued, and if so, then to what extent and direction.

The purpose of this study is to examine how five different multi-level governance (MLG) models affect place branding (PB) performance in Saudi Arabia.

In hierarchical administrative systems, central governments exert control on PB, influencing its effectiveness. While PB as such is widely studied, the effect of MLG on PB performance in centralized administrative systems remains understudied. The study is approached as a multiple case study of nine cities.

The study reveals that different MLG models indeed affect PB performance differently. Direct access to central leadership and resources boosts branding performance, while privatization promotes flexibility with similarly positive effects. Study findings, furthermore, show that some cities are considered too big to fail. Cities such as Riyadh and Neom are of prime importance and receive plenty of resources and leadership attention, while others are considered peripheral, are under-resourced and branding performance suffers accordingly. Emerging differences in PB performance associated with different MLG models are thus likely to deepen the gap between urban economic winners and losers.

This paper introduces five MLG models based on the actors involved in PB, their interactions and their access to resources. For each model, this paper assesses other factors which may influence the effectiveness of PB as well, such as access to the national leadership and staff capacity. This research thereby adds to the literature by identifying specific factors within MLG models influencing PB performance in hierarchical administrative systems.

Since 2009 Swedish municipalities may apply the Act on System of Choice (LOV) in, among other things, eldercare. About half of the 290 Swedish municipalities have chosen this within home-care services for older citizens, thus creating conditions for a welfare mix where private and public providers compete. Some of these municipalities later made decisions to abolish LOV. This article aims to analyse the arguments put forward by municipal politicians to abolish LOV and discusses if the case of abandoning LOV represents a case of re-municipalization.

Qualitative method was used to analyse decision protocols and media materials from 20 Swedish municipalities that had abolished LOV in home-care services.

The article shows that politics and ideology seem to have only a limited significance in abolishing LOV. The most important arguments found in the empirical materials were instead pragmatic and related to the transaction costs: in smaller municipalities about the weak position of private providers and in larger municipalities about reported cases of welfare crime and extensive needs to control and review. In smaller municipalities, LOV was replaced by public monopoly and in larger municipalities by other types of procurements.

With its focus on eldercare in party-dominated municipalities, the article adds knowledge to the literature on drivers of re-municipalization but also discusses possible delimitations of the concept of re-municipalization.

The paper explores a management fashion within the Swedish Public Sector called intrapreneurships. Intrapreneurships became popular during a period of public debate on what forms of organizing are most suitable for the production of welfare. However, while the popularity of the model was short-lived, a few municipalities nevertheless constitute examples of where it was supported for a longer period. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the model became continuously legitimate having lost its appeal elsewhere.

The paper comprises a longitudinal analysis of two municipalities. Field-material was collected through qualitative methods including interviews (35 interviews, 42 interviewees) and document analysis.

The results draw attention to how management fashions become enduring. The metaphor of translation highlights how different professional actors in a local setting apply editing rules, and how they constitute work acquired for continuous translation of the model in order to make it legitimate, disseminated and supported. The study draws particular attention to the large number of actors involved in the editing process.

Besides an extended understanding of management concepts, to explain the anomaly of a long-standing management fashion, the paper illustrates the importance of acknowledging editing as processes and not process. A key notion in why intrapreneurships became legitimate is that professional actors edited the model differently in order to satisfy their desires and needs. This contradicts the more common case study design in translation studies, which seeks a unitary translation process, in a single local setting.

Contrasting two countries with different gender regimes and welfare states, Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to analyse how the institutional context affects the ways in which a neo-liberal reform agenda is translated into institutional changes and propose how such changes impact the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship.

This study uses document analysis and previous studies to describe and analyse the institutions and the institutional changes. This paper uses Scandinavian institutional theory as the interpretative framework.

This study proposes that: in well-developed welfare states with a high level of gender equality, consequences of neo-liberal agenda for the preconditions for women entrepreneurs are more likely to be negative than positive. In less developed states with a low level of gender equality, the gendered consequences of neo-liberal reforms may be mixed and the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship more positive than negative. How neo-liberalism impacts preconditions for women entrepreneurs depend on the institutional framework in terms of a trustworthy women-friendly state and level of gender equality.

The study calls for bringing the effects on the gender of the neo-liberal primacy of market solutions out of the black box. Studying how women entrepreneurs perceive these effects necessitates qualitative ethnographic data.

This paper demonstrates why any discussion of the impact of political or economic reforms on women’s entrepreneurship must take a country’s specific institutional context into account. Further, previous studies on neo-liberalism have rarely taken an interest in Africa.

A deteriorating security situation and an increased need for defence equipment calls for new forms of collaboration between Armed Forces and the defence industry. This paper aims to investigate the ways in which the accelerating demand for increased security of supply of equipment and supplies to the Armed Forces requires adaptability in the procurement process that is governed by laws on public procurement (PP).

This paper is based on a review of current literature as well as empirical data obtained through interviews with representatives from the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration and the Swedish defence industry.

Collaboration with the globalized defence industry requires new approaches, where the PP rules make procurement of a safe supply of defence equipment difficult.

The study's empirical data and findings are based on the Swedish context. In order to draw more general conclusions in a defence context, the study should be expanded to cover more nations.

The findings will enable the defence industry and the procurement authorizations to better understand the requirements of Armed Forces, and how to cooperate under applicable legal and regulatory requirements.

The paper extends the extant body of academic knowledge of the security of supply into the defence sector. It serves as a first step towards articulating a call for new approaches to collaboration in defence supply chains.

The Spanish airport system contains several regional airports within an amenity distance and alternative travel modes. Profitable airports cross-subsidise small airports, which are not required for regional development or connectivity. Airports are government-owned and centralised-managed by Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA, for its Spanish acronym). This study aims to analyse the probability of an under-used public infrastructure and the AENA’s managerial ability as per the financial sustainability of the network in the long term.

The national regulatory framework determines the airports’ environment. Six airports revealed unobserved heterogeneity, avoiding model misspecification. The framework is defined through proxies of the singularities of the Spanish framework: public investments and geographical specifications. The stochastic frontier analysis model follows two time-varying specifications, accounting for airports’ environmental factors, to ensure the robustness of the results to differ from the inefficiency caused by AENA and external factors.

Airports’ infrastructure capacity and traffic are not correlated; regional airports become a financial burden for the system unless they specialise or differentiate. Proxies defining the airports’ context are relevant. Because airports do not compete for airlines and passengers, there are too many regional airports with little traffic, resulting in disused public infrastructure that falls far short of improving connectivity and regional development.

This study contributes to paying attention to the characteristics of the regulatory framework, such as management strongly centralised in AENA, airport charges decided by the owner, lack of competition and lack of an independent regulatory entity. Another original contribution considers reliable capital measures (airports’ infrastructure).

Based on the hypothesis of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between environmental pollutants (as measured by CO₂ emissions) and GDP for India, over the period 1980–2012. The presence of an inverted “U” shape relationship is examined while controlling for factors such as the degree of trade openness, foreign direct investment, oil prices, the legal system and industrialization.

To verify whether the EKC follows a linear, quadratic or polynomial form, autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach for cointegration with structural breaks is adopted. The annual time series data for carbon emissions (CO₂), economic growth (GDP), industrial development (industrialization), foreign direct investment and trade openness have been obtained from World Development Indicators online database. Crude oil price (international price index) for the period is collected from the International Monetary Fund. Data for total petroleum consumption are collected from the US Energy Information Agency. Data for economic freedom variables are from the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom Index's online database.

The findings support the existence of inverted U-shaped EKC in the short-run, but not in the long-run. A linear monotonic relationship has also been estimated in select model specifications. Additionally, trade openness has been estimated to reduce emissions in models, which incorporate FDI. Else, where significant, its impact on carbon emissions is adverse. A rise in fuel price leads to reduction in carbon emissions across model specifications. Further, the lower size of government degrades the environment both in the long-run and short-run.

Given the existence of the pollution haven hypothesis, wherein more trade and foreign direct investments cause environmental degradation, the paper proposes formulation of appropriate regulatory mechanisms that are environmentally friendly. Additionally, India's new economic policies, favoring liberalization, privatization and globalization, reinforces the need to strengthen environmental regulations.

Incorporation of economic freedom as measured by the “Size of Government” in the EKC model is unique. “Size of Government” deserves a special mention. The rationale for including this explanatory variable is to understand whether countries with lower government size are more polluting. After all, theory does suggest that goods and services, which have higher social cost vis-à-vis private cost, shall be overproduced in economies that adopt more market-friendly policies, necessitating government intervention. In the study, size of government is measured as per the definition and methodology adopted by Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index.