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The health services of many less‐developed countries continue to struggle. Donors also continue to contribute money, equipment and personnel in the hope of producing sustainable improvements in these health services. Despite this cumulative effort over many years, some health services in Africa have failed to make significant gains. Suggests that the giving of aid, through the provision of medical and other personnel, produces a potentially damaging double standard. In particular, the dramatic dichotomy in the renumerations of local and foreign doctors may have the unintended, but damaging, effect of demotivating local staff. In addition, reviews research which supports the notion that the higher‐paid foreign doctors may also experience a demotivation, through being focused on extrinsic rather than intrinsic aspects of their work. Discusses implications of this double demotivation – in local as well as foreign doctors – for the provision of medical personnel in less‐developed countries.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the English, Northern Irish, Arab Israeli, Trinidad and Tobago and the US cases. The focus is what we have learned from the research about: the relationships within Education Governance Systems to navigate turbulence; building capacity for empowering senior-level leaders to deliver on their manifestos and outstanding track records for school improvement; reducing the achievement gap between dominant groups and marginalised groups in International Governance Systems. The chapter identifies that all cases require participatory multi-stakeholder action to develop and support collaborative networked learning communities in practice. Such communities of and for practice need to Empower Young Societal Innovators for Equity and Renewal (EYSIER). Policy and Education Governance Systems have the potential to synthesise the best of what has been said and done in the past, with innovative ways of working by empowering networks of knowledge building and advocacy. These networks co-create opportunities for action learners to work together to describe intersectionalities of discrimination and begin to remove fear of discrimination and marginalisation from Education Governance Systems. From this position, senior-level leaders can work with their leaders, teachers, parents and students to optimise how learning about the self, and learning how to learn improves community education for all students and EYSIER.

As one of the pillar sectors, China’s construction industry (CE) is not efficient in productivity with large regional gaps over the past decades. It is crucial for stakeholders to have insightful information on regional input of resources and output of productive efficiency for making policies and investment decisions. The purpose of this paper is to develop an efficiency measurement for the CE and explore the regional differences of construction productive efficiency across the three regions of China.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is an objective benchmarking methodology used for measuring the performance of construction productivity. Distance friction minimization (DFM) approach, based on DEA model, is applied to identify the causes of inefficiency, sources of growth and the optimal paths to efficient frontier for regional CE. Further studies are conducted to provide insightful information for efficiency improvement, according to DFM modeling results and empirical analysis.

The results indicate that eastern region leads construction development due to strong performance of coastal provinces. Faced with decreasing supply of skilled workers in developed region, investing more on construction plants and equipment for labor savings is more efficient to the long-term productivity growth of CE in the east. For developing midland region, heavy reliance on cheap manpower should be gradually relieved by allocating more budgets to vocational training and education program to boost quality labor supply, as well as making steady investment on construction equipment and advanced technology. In underdeveloped western region, raising construction labor wages is recommended to attract more workers to meet the market demand and achieve an optimal production efficiency in the CE.

The findings provide insights into the causes of inefficiency, the sources of growth and the best strategies for efficiency improvement in regional CE, recommendations are made for policy making and strategic planning to enhance the overall performance of China’s construction productive efficiency.

There are a number of variations in payment schemes which companies can apply: a system related to productivity might pay commission, either individual or group. Then there are lump‐sum bonuses and other forms of incentive. David Freestone's conclusion is that there is no perfect remuneration system, but the key must be simplicity, both in understanding and operation.

Since its inception, the term ‘corporate governance’ (CG) has attracted mainstream attention, continuing to generate discussion among academics, practitioners and policy-makers. This heightened interest generally revolves around clarifying the principles of CG, both in theory and practice. This is particularly important in the context of emerging economies, where the sociocultural ethos and values often differ from those of most developed economies, where the CG concept was conceived and developed. In this vein, this chapter draws on empirical data to explore practical CG challenges faced by corporations in the Nigerian manufacturing and banking sectors. Nigeria is a country whose dominant national culture is one of high-power distance (HPD), which endorses servant-master relationships and encourages deference to authority. In this study, we found that HPD culture can undermine stakeholders’ ability to hold corporate executives to account on practices and behaviours that are antithetical to principles of corporate integrity and ethics, accountability, transparency, autonomy and stakeholder engagement, which in turn, leads to (and exacerbates) corporate misgovernance among businesses in the sectors. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are expatiated in the discussion section.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of sustainable board governance, based on (1) sustainability board committees, (2) critical mass of female board members and (3) sustainability-related executive compensation, on sustainable supply chain reporting (SSCR).

Based on stakeholder and critical mass theories, a sample of 1,577 firm-year observations for firms listed at the EuroSTOXX600 for the period 2017–2021 is used. Sustainable board governance and SSCR proxies are collected from the Refinitiv database. Correlation and logit regression analyses are conducted to measure the impact of sustainable board governance on SSCR.

Sustainable board governance significantly improves SSCR. The findings are robust to various robustness checks, based on the modification of dependent and independent variables.

Due to massive regulations on sustainability reporting, finance and corporate governance, firms listed on the EuroSTOXX 600 are focused in this analysis. The European capital market represents a unique setting for archival research.

European standard setters should connect the relationship between sustainable board governance and SSCR in future regulations, for example, due to the recent corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD) and corporate sustainability due diligence directive (CSDDD).

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper provides the first analysis on the impact of sustainable board governance on SSCR.

Employers offer pension plans for two main reasons: paternalism and skills market competitiveness. Recent changes in legislation and business practice have prompted the scrutiny of the underpinnings for such a management tradition. Identifies several relevant factors that derive from: field work undertaken by the authors; the Pensions Act 1995; and recent changes to corporations tax. It is argued that what has emerged is a sharply focused trade‐off, relating to the asset and liability characteristics of employer‐based pension schemes. This questions the sustainability of all types of pension plans, and thereby has a place in strategies affecting financial planning and business development.

This paper aims to describe, compare and analyze liquidity policies from the central bank of Indonesia, particularly reserve requirements, with respect to Islamic as well as conventional banks.

This paper provides some critical assessments on the policy applied by the central bank of Indonesia to both Islamic and conventional banks with regards to the reserve requirements applied in the Indonesian banking system. The analysis is based on whether both policies (Islamic and conventional) provide fairness to the banks as well as whether those policies support the real sector. In addition, the current global practice is also briefly described as a justification of the important and relevance of the current study.

The authors find that the policy imposed on the Islamic banks is designed to boost the real sector, compared to that of conventional banks. For the policy with respect to Islamic banks, it recognizes the banks which have been doing well in their main role as financial intermediaries and “punishes” them when they fail to do so. This policy could not be found in the context of conventional banks.

The authors argue that the current approach used for Islamic banks can also be adopted and imposed on conventional banks. This leads to a more stable financial system, since it supports the real sector.

This paper is the first to analyze central bank policies with respect to banks (Islamic as well as conventional banks) in relation to their role as financial intermediaries.

Discusses the need to market nursing as a career with regard to the present unsatisfactory nature of the current mix of trained/untrained nurses, length of service and relative costs, and wastage being high. Examines the relevance of basic marketing concepts for nursing, stating above all, the target audience must be critically defined. States marketing strategy must ‘sell’ nursing – but only to the right people. Reviews current marketing programmes, local and national, evaluating various aspects of nurse recruitment using economic and moral success as the ‘twin peaks’. Concludes that developing a more effective marketing strategy would, in the long term, attract better, more suitable nurses to the profession.

Service user involvement is crucial in education and training as it can add a unique perspective and promote better practice. This paper provides an example of service user involvement in all aspects of the training. The involvement will be considered from the perspectives of the service user and a student. Implications and issues for practice are discussed.