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Business research and development (R&D) is of critical importance for innovation and economic growth. The purpose of this study is to present an application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to select the most appropriate policy measure to support the business expenditure on R&D (BERD).

AHP method adopts a multi-criteria approach that can be used to analyse and prioritize the policy measures based on pairwise comparisons between several attributes that affect the selection of a policy tool. The model formulated in this study is applied to a real case of supporting decision-makers in some high-tech sectors in Iran.

The results highlight the four main financial policy measures implemented in Iran to enhance the BERD; those are, public procurement for R&D, direct subsidies for R&D, grants for R&D and income tax credit for firms have the priority values of 0.280, 0.260, 0.249 and 0.211, respectively.

The findings of this study are based on subjective evaluation of policy measures by experts of designing policy measures. Objective assessment of policy measures is important too because the preferences of policy interventions change during the time. Another significant point is that the priorities of specific policy measures depend on the effectiveness of their implementing arrangement and the previously successful experience of firms in receiving them.

This paper presents an application of the AHP to select the most appropriate policy measure to support the BERD. This method could be used to prioritize the policies and interventions that governments implement to solve different problems, especially at the innovation system level.

Indicators of economic and social phenomena can be useful descriptive and analytical inputs for public policy. The “social indicators movement” has emerged in the last decade and is devoted to the measurement of widely‐ranging dimensions of human welfare. For the most part, questions of systematic measurement for public policy are explored here. Drawing initially on some traditions of measurement in economics, the principal aim is to provide a broad theoretical frame of reference for policy indicator design. Questions of indicator development necessarily involve ideas of suitability or validity of indicators designed for a purpose. Approaches to indicator design for the purpose of enhancing collective decision‐making—including formal model building approaches—are subsumed as special cases once a more general theory is espoused in sections II and III.

The purpose of this paper is to examine spatiality of transitions by combining aspects of urban form to policy analysis. It aims to increase understanding of how urban form relates to potential effects of transport policies on urban mobility transitions.

Novel analytical framework combines concepts of path dependence, path creation and path destabilisation to three urban fabrics (walking, transit and car cities), to study the transition potential of recent transport policy measures influencing the Helsinki region in Finland.

Analysis showed that the potential effects of single policy measures often reach over all three urban fabrics. A policy measure may simultaneously contain elements of both path dependence, i.e. support for fossil-fuel based private motoring in the car city and path creation, i.e. stimulation of innovations in transit or walking cities. Policy outcomes are often conditional on implementation of other policy measures. For transition governance, this indicates that policy mixes should both destabilise car cities and enforce path creation in walking and transit cities.

Findings are based on potential rather than evaluated impacts and a limited sample of policies.

Findings support previous research on the importance of policy coherence: multiple policies and coherence across domains are important. They demonstrate the usefulness of analysing recent or planned policies from the transition perspective.

The paper provides novel insights by combining policy analysis to the spatial model of overlapping urban fabrics. In addition, it applies the concepts of path dependence, path creation and path destabilisation in a new way.

The growing number of studies shows that government policies and measures are critical in determining entrepreneurship levels of regions. Any changes in the government policies and measures are, therefore, expected to bring significant changes at the entrepreneurship levels. This paper aims to explore the importance of the government policies and measures, along with supply and demand-side determinants in regional entrepreneurship in Turkey and explains the convergence of entrepreneurship among two distinct periods corresponding to changes in the government policies and measures concerning entrepreneurship.

Looking at a study on 81 NUTS-III regions of Turkey, this paper focusses on regional determinants important in the separation of regions with different entrepreneurship trajectories (based on the initial level and the rate of increase in entrepreneurship). Using discriminant function analysis, this paper tries to show how far government policies are important in distinguishing regions with different entrepreneurship levels.

The outcomes of the analysis show that certain policies and measures recently introduced have become instrumental in triggering higher entrepreneurship levels in regions with already higher levels of entrepreneurship, but not in regions with initially lower levels of entrepreneurship.

This study contributes to the existing regional entrepreneurship literature through introducing the research findings on the importance of government policies and institutions on regional entrepreneurship, besides the role of regional capacities and assets.

This paper aims to empirically examine how shocks to monetary policy measures (the short-term nominal interest rate and broad money supply) affect macroeconomic aggregates, namely, output growth of the economy, national price levels and the nominal exchange rate.

Johansen’s (1995) cointegration technique and error correction models are used to explore the long-run relationship among variables. To investigate how macroeconomic aggregates respond to a one-standard deviation shock to the underlying monetary measures, the authors estimate impulse response functions based on error correction models. The study uses quarterly data covering the period 1980-2009.

The results provide evidence that there is a long-run stable relationship between the authors' monetary measures and the underlying macroeconomic aggregates. They also find that the industrial production adjusts at a faster speed relative to commodity prices and the exchange rate over the examined period. Further, they show that the short-term interest rate has relatively stronger effects on output as compared to broad money supply, whereas prices and exchange rates adjust more quickly to their long-run equilibrium when money supply is used as a measure of monetary policy. Finally, the authors find significant evidence of a price puzzle regardless of whether they consider a closed or an open economy case. However, an initial appreciation of exchange rate is observed in response to a one-standard deviation shock to money supply, indicating the overshooting hypothesis phenomenon.

The findings of the analysis suggest that the interest rate-oriented monetary policy is more effective when the monetary authorities’ objective is to enhance the output growth of the economy. However, in case of inflation targeting, the broad money supply seems a more appropriate instrument. Our findings also suggest that the monetary policy has a significant role in stabilizing both real and nominal sectors of the economy.

The main value of this paper is to examine the significance of monetary policy for a developing and relatively small open economy, namely, Pakistan. The authors use the error correction model, which improves the estimation by accounting for the long-run association. They also take into account the world oil prices by including the world commodity price index as a control variable in their empirical investigation. Finally, they utilize quarterly data rather than annual, and they cover a relatively recent sample period.

The purpose of this scoping review is to analyse comparative studies on social-policy measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in Global North welfare states. The authors also consider the potential influence of the regimes on the responses.

The authors conducted a scoping review of six databases including peer-reviewed comparative studies. In an iterative process with exact inclusion criteria, the authors screened 699 titles/abstracts/articles and found 16 comparative research articles to be included in the review and analysis. The review summarises the main themes of the comparative articles and the articles' typical features.

The results show that social-policy measures were directed specifically at working-age people to minimise income loss and to save jobs. The pandemic also increased care-related responsibilities, necessitating the expansion of current policies and the implementation of new instruments. Despite the differences in responses between universalistic and residual welfare states, the influence of welfare regimes on COVID-19 social-policy measures remains unclear. The emergency responses in the different regimes varied widely in terms of coverage.

The results of this review provide a basis on which to conduct future studies, identify new research topics and knowledge gaps and inspire new research questions and hypotheses. Given the accumulation of scientific knowledge in the area of social-policy measures, the need for systematic reviews will grow in the future.

The authors identified three main themes: changes in employment protection, changes in care-related income protection and the potential influence of welfare-state regimes on COVID-19-related measures.

This paper aims to seek to demonstrate that a non-scientific approach to policy design causes policymakers to persist in the development and use of conventional and inefficient “top-down” policies. This paper takes the case of the design of official pro-internationalization policy, intended to promote internationalization through outward investment, to reveal inadequacies and inefficiencies in policy design. Through an analysis of the merits of introducing a “bottom-up” approach, it also aims to show how policy redesign would better yield the desired specific and effective impacts sought by policymakers.

A framework was developed, comprising a set of real policy measures, two indexes to quantify the alignment between government policies and firms’ strategies and a regression model to test the impact of the misalignment on firm performance. This framework uses primary empirical data.

The results are obtained through an item-by-item comparison between use and revealed, or perceived, importance of each type of public support and then, through the indexes, which rank the different types of incentives according to their importance and use. Analysis of these suggests that some measures could be more efficient, and that firms with higher levels of foreign market commitment tend to be more aligned with public policy, and benefit from it most, while those firms with a lower degree of internationalization are the least well served by policy support measures.

These results identify systematic weaknesses in policy design and point to the reasons for these weaknesses. The findings suggest that governments tend to craft “top-down” policy, based on high-level presumptions about the nature of all firms’ strategies towards internationalization and international expansion. We propose that these presumptions result from flawed evaluations of policy effectiveness overly influenced by existing foreign investors, to the detriment of the true and intended strategies of the actual target group of the least internationalized firms. It is concluded that to improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of policy actions, the traditional “top-down” intervention paradigm of policy-making should be complemented by policy designed from the “bottom-up”, making use of reliable information about all firms’ strategies, and taking care to better identify natural target groups of firms according to their existing or potential resources and capabilities.

Assessing and measuring the extent of organization-level policy implementation has received little scholarly attention, especially in the areas of local governments' procurement and environmental protection. To rectify the paucity of research in this area, this paper adopts Leonard-Barton's (1988) conceptualization of the misalignment between the (policy) innovation and the organization and draws on an original survey of local government finance, environment and public works departments in a representative sample of US cities with at least 25,000 residents to develop a strategy for measuring the extent of the implementation of a sustainable procurement policy (SPP) in local governments.

The authors demonstrate through the construction of a composite index that in order for a SPP to be fully implemented, standards and rules, routines and decision-making criteria need to exist to reconcile any technical, infrastructural and decision-making misalignments between the new policy and an organization's pre-existing norms and routines.

The authors empirically assess and demonstrate that the paper's proposed composite measure of policy implementation is robust to multiple specifications and measurement reliability and construct validity tests.

Whereas the existing literature from political science and policy science has tended to focus on higher levels of implementation in government through a complex hierarchical system, this paper underscores the importance of the policy implementation at the organizational level. Moreover, the authors contribute methodologically by our development of a strategy to measure the extent of the implementation of a SPP by local governments.

Employment-related measures play a significant part in preventive and mitigative social policies. The importance of these actions is especially emphasised in times of crisis. This paper provides empirical insights into employment-related measures implemented in a sample of OECD countries as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Furthermore, it addresses the continuity of the measures by July 2022.

The research applies and further develops a capability approach in the COVID-19 context to provide a theoretically informed empirical understanding of the implemented employment related measures.

The results indicate that countries expanded the coverage of previous preventive and mitigative employment measures horizontally and vertically while also introducing new schemes to protect workers. The main conclusions suggest that most employment-related measures (65.5%) were preventive aiming at saving jobs and broadening peoples capabilities with bridging measures during the crisis. The employment measures served first as an emergency aid. However, most measures were recalibrated and changed incrementally toward 2022.

The data consisted major employment-related measures and changes in social policies the studied countries. The authors focussed the examination on governmental-level measures. Thus, sub-national or sector-specific responses, for example tripartite agreements in certain employment sectors or social transfers in certain areas, were excluded.

The way in which welfare states reacted to employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on how governments approach social policies in the future. The capability approach exhibits a pronounced strength by facilitating the establishment of sustainable trajectories for social policy and welfare services.

The capability approach embracing the preactive and proactive role of social policies lends a unique perspective on public policies.

This paper is based on work undertaken for the Commonwealth Department of Finance and Administration and reports on recent developments within the Australian public sector of performance measurement in policy advice output. It outlines the role of performance information in an accrual‐based outcomes and outputs management framework, examines the merits of a model for developing criteria for “good” performance information and explores how these design principles might be applied to policy advice output. The paper identifies the key attributes of policy advice output from the perspective of both providers and clients and their linkage to proposed performance indicators, and concludes by surveying the political and accountability problems associated with specifying and measuring policy advice in government.