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New public management (NPM) has transformed the public sector auditing context, although in quite different ways. Further, investigations into NPM’s impact on public sector auditors and audit institutions have been largely unconnected, with the exception of the critical examination of performance audits. We investigate the question of how public sector auditors’ roles and activities have changed as a result of NPM and later reforms.

We examine and synthesise public sector audit research examining reforms since the year 2000. The research presented considers changes to external and internal public sector audits as well as the development of public sector audit institutions – known as supreme audit institutions (SAIs).

Considerable changes have occurred. Many were influenced by NPM, but others have evolved from the eco-system of accounting, auditing and public sector management. External auditors have responded to an increase in demand for accountability. Additional management and governance techniques have been introduced from the private sector, such as internal auditing and audit committees. NPM has also led to conflicting trends, particularly when governments introduced competition to public sector auditing by contracting out but then chose to centralise to improve accountability. There is also greater international influence now through bodies like the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and similar regional bodies.

NPM reforms and the eco-system have impacted public sector auditing. Sustainability reporting is emerging as an area requiring more auditing attention; auditors also need to continue to develop better ways to communicate with citizens. Further, research into auditing in non-Western nations and emerging technologies is also required, especially where it provides learnings around more valuable audit practices. Empirical evidence is required of the strengths and weaknesses of SAIs’ structural variety.

This chapter is aimed at contributing to the question of how institutional reforms affect multi-level governance (MLG) capacities and thus the performance of public task fulfillment with a particular focus on the local level of government in England, France, and Germany.

Drawing on concepts of institutional evaluation, we analytically distinguish six dimensions of impact assessment: vertical coordination; horizontal coordination; efficiency/savings; effectiveness/quality; political accountability/democratic control; equity of service standards. Methodologically, we rely on document analysis and expert judgments that could be gleaned from case studies in the three countries and a comprehensive evaluation of the available secondary data in the respective national and local contexts.

Institutional reforms in the intergovernmental setting have exerted a significant influence on task fulfillment and the performance of service delivery. Irrespective of whether MLG practice corresponds to type I or type II, task devolution (decentralization/de-concentration) furthers the interlocal variation and makes the equity of service delivery shrink. There is a general tendency of improved horizontal/MLG type I coordination capacities, especially after political decentralization, less in the case of administrative decentralization. However, decentralization often entails considerable additional costs which sometimes overload local governments.

The distinction between multi-purpose territorial organization/MLG I and single-purpose functional organization/MLG II provides a suitable analytical frame for institutional evaluation and impact assessment of reforms in the intergovernmental setting. Furthermore, comparative research into the relationship between MLG and institutional reforms is needed to reveal the explanatory power of intervening factors, such as the local budgetary and staff situation, local policy preferences, and political interests in conjunction with the salience of the transferred tasks.

The findings provide evidence on the causal relationship between specific types of (vertical) institutional reforms, performance, and task-related characteristics. Policy-makers and government actors may use this information when drafting institutional reform programs and determining the allocation of public tasks in the intergovernmental setting.

In general, the euphoric expectations placed upon decentralization strategies in modern societies cannot straightforwardly be justified. Our findings show that any type of task transfer to lower levels of government exacerbates existing disparities or creates new ones. However, the integration of tasks within multi-functional, politically accountable local governments may help to improve MLG type I coordination in favor of local communities and territorially based societal actors, while the opposite may be said with regard to de-concentration and the strengthening of MLG type II coordination.

The chapter addresses a missing linkage in the existing MLG literature which has hitherto predominantly been focused on the political decision-making and on the implementation of reforms in the intergovernmental settings of European countries, whereas the impact of such reforms and of their consequences for MLG has remained largely ignored.

The kindergarten curriculum in mainland China has evolved through four periods and the current reform began in the end of 1980s. The reform aimed to transform kindergarten practice by shaping ideologies including respect for individual child, active learning, and play-based integrated curriculum. This review of research literatures shows that compared with the practice before the reform, many kindergarten teachers organize classrooms in learning centers, provide more play materials, pay time, and freedom for free play, and pay more attention to individuals. But indoor space organized in rice-seedling-bed model, teacher-led group instruction and teacher-controlled interactions are still often observed after three decades of reform efforts; there still exist great variations among kindergartens of different sponsoring bodies and in different regions. The problems resulted from the innate deficiencies of the top-down and value-priority reform, the conflicts between the advocated value and the traditional Chinese culture with emphasis on Ming-Fen, testing, and the value of children for the whole family and nation, and the unequal distribution of public resources decided by the educational institutions. Therefore, the curriculum reform is not a separate endeavor from other social changes, but a comprehensive and systematic change. To guarantee the success of the curriculum reform, the Chinese society needs cultural transformation and institutional reconstruction.

This chapter provides a synthesis of the research project which investigated whether or not the most recent mathematics curriculum reform has reached the classroom and influenced classroom practice and student learning in the mainland China. Three types of evidence for change as a result of the curriculum reform were examined. These included the beliefs and perceptions of teachers about learning and teaching mathematics, the cognitive features of learning tasks and of classroom interaction that were implemented in classroom, and student learning outcomes. Two groups of elementary math teachers and their students participated in the study. One group had participated in the reform implementation in classroom for several years, and the other group had used the conventional curriculum when the project was conducted in 2005. About 150 videotaped class sessions were analyzed from 58 classrooms of the two groups. Survey methods were used to probe the changes in the beliefs and perceptions of teachers about teaching and learning mathematics. The student learning outcomes were assessed for three times with multiple measures of mathematics achievement. Findings of the project provide the converging evidence that the curriculum reform has resulted in some of the expected changes. Reform teachers were more likely to hold a dynamic view of mathematics and to indicate the importance to provide students the learning opportunity to hypothesize, to proof, and to communicate in learning mathematics. The reform classrooms used more learning tasks with higher cognitive demands. The teachers in the reform classrooms asked more questions that required students to describe procedures leading to their answers and the students in the reform classrooms raised more questions in learning mathematics. Students of the reform classrooms showed to have achieved a relatively more balanced development in different cognitive areas of mathematics achievement.

This chapter begins with an examination of the complexities, challenges, and contradictions that are presented by policies and practices associated with the College Entrance Examination (CEE) and higher education admissions during the three decades of China's reform era. It then focuses on recent reform polices as outlined in the national education 2020 Blueprint (National Educational Reform and Development Plan, 2010–2020), which deepens the debate about the role of the CEE in shaping the mission of education and distributing opportunities and “talents” affecting social mobility, university autonomy, and national development. The CEE stands at the epicenter of educational reform, criticized for hamstringing institutional autonomy and innovation; reducing schooling to a soulless competition; and unfairly advantaging urban children with greater educational opportunities. This chapter explains the staying power of the CEE and concludes that China's examination culture will intensify in the short term, as the CEE is clung to as a last bastion of meritocracy and is reinforced by the state's desire to cultivate what the 2020 Blueprint labels elite “selected innovative” and “pragmatic” talents. Content and policy analysis is used to explain CEE reform since 1978 and provide a backdrop for discussion of pedagogical, market, and compensatory reform strategies that tinker at the CEE's margins. To take into account micro-institutional processes involved in the CEE's creation, maintenance, and resistance to change, we examine stakeholders' frames of common perception through 2010 interviews with exam candidates and their parents, and faculty and administrators from four Gansu Province universities. These interviews illustrate what the CEE means to diverse families and reveal how admission policies impact students, teachers, and university faculty and administrators at both elite and non-elite higher education institutions. The slow change of CEE reform discourse and practice as China inches from examination-based selection criteria to ability-based selection criteria has begun to redefine the trajectories of recognized “elites,” whose actions are motivated by and reflect the changing needs of society and economic development. Friction and resistance on the ground, therefore, point to the ways in which the changing needs of the labor market, the policy mandates of the national agenda, the meritocratic ideal and the educational desires of China's citizenry intertwine to shape, and be shaped by, CEE policies.

In Zimbabwe, a curious set of events has occurred since early 2000. Land reform, usually taken to be in defence of rural democracy, is being employed by a government determined to remain in power and veering increasingly toward violent authoritarianism.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine the contextual variables that influence the pace of public sector reforms through the adoption of accrual accounting for the Indonesian public sector.

Design/methodology/approach – The study employs a historically informed study based on a modified version of the Luder's (1992) Contingency Model (LCM). The data are drawn from official documents issued by the Indonesian government about reporting system for the public sector in the country and interviews with the key figures involved in the public sector accounting reforms in Indonesia. The study also uses publicly available information addressing the recent progress in the implementation of the accrual accounting system in the Indonesian public sector.

Key findings – The adoption of accrual accounting in the Indonesian public sector was stimulated by the economic crisis, prodemocratic movements, and international pressures for the reform of the public sector. However, the public sector accounting reforms in the country are confronted with significant implementation barriers which include legal issues, the lack of political supports, and skilled human resources. These barriers in turn threaten the intended purposes to be achieved through the greater economic and public sector reforms in the newly democratic Indonesia.

Research limitations/implications – The arguments of the study should be understood in the context of the institutional setting of Indonesia as a developing country. Nonetheless, the findings of this study show an example of the complexity faced through the use of the private sector accounting practice in the public sector context.

Originality/value – The findings of the study support the notion that the nature of legal system, political support, and human resource capacity influence the extent to which an accounting system is adopted in the public sector.

The literature on sustainable development reveals that the financial sector and the real sector should maintain a coherent association in the long run. Thus, like that in a country-level significance, the relevance of the investigations of the interrelationships between the financial sector’s development and the growth and development of the states within a country is also required to be done. This chapter tries to examine the interrelationships between two sets of variables, bank credit and state output, and bank credit and human development, for the pre-reform and post-reform periods. Using the appropriate time series econometric analysis, the study finds no long-run relationships between credit and NSDP during the pre-reform period but it has observed a number of states where such stable relations hold during the post-reform period. Again, there are mixed results between the two in the Granger causality analysis during both the periods. There are the states like AP, Bihar, Karnataka, Kerala and WB where developments in the financial sector influence the growth of the real sector, while the reverse causality, that is, from the real sector to the financial sectors works in case of Assam, Haryana, MP and Maharashtra. Bidirectional causality between the two is observed in the states like TN, WB, etc. Further, the study finds very small number of states where credit and human development are interlinked in the long run. However, in the short run, the financial sector makes influences to the human development in case of the states like Bihar, Odisha and TN.

The purpose of this chapter is to benchmark Tunisia against other emerging economies in terms of the regulatory barriers affecting particular services sectors and to assess the economy-wide effects of further liberalizing these services trade restrictions, compared with reducing the dispersion in barriers to its merchandise trade. On the basis of a rather restricted sample of services sectors, partial regulatory reform would yield gains roughly equivalent to full unilateral reform of manufacturing tariffs, but roughly one-tenth the gains from full bilateral reform of border protection in agriculture with the European Union. The adjustment costs associated with these services trade reforms would be minimal. The chapter identifies the reasons why the gains from these services reforms are relatively small and argues that a wider set of reforms could provide win-win outcomes and even fewer adjustment costs. By contrast, the gains in agriculture and manufacturing tend to come at the expense of domestic output in the reforming sectors – the gains are greater, but so too are the adjustment costs.

This paper reviews the socioeconomic reform policies employed by the China’s party-state between the early 1980s and mid-2000s. Unlike conventional frameworks viewing the reform as an economic development project designed for “national interests” or “ruling elites” personal interests’, this paper interprets the reform as a political attempt of the state made in response to the crisis of dominance over the working class. In the face of the crisis of class dominance expressed as economic and political unrests related to low growth of labor productivity, the state managers of the post-Mao era embarked on the reform as a way of restoring the state’s ability to impose work upon the workers. As is well known, the reform was “market-oriented” with the state relinquishing some of the control over economic managements, and this paper sees it as the state’s strategy of reducing political risks arising from a highly politicized form of class confrontation. By making pressures upon producers look like a purely economic matter arising from private relations, that is, by depoliticizing exploitative social relations of production, the market-oriented reform helped the party-state effectively repress workers without a serious damage to political legitimacy. From this perspective, this paper examines the reform policies in management of labor, firms, and money, and how those policies contributed to the state’s ability to discipline class relations of production in China. This paper, however, does not conclude that the reform as a depoliticization strategy of class dominance was successful and nonproblematic. It is argued that beneath the success of the reform was a growing necessity of crisis; faced with re-burgeoning workers’ struggles, growing problems of overproduction/overaccumulation, and the resultant looming banking system crisis, the party-state came to find it more and more necessary to bring the economic managements back into political ambit with the related political risks also growing.