The Politics of Needs Assessment: The Treasury Select Committee and the Barnett Formula

Parliamentarians' interest in Scottish public expenditure has been rising since 1987, when the electoral results left the Conservatives vulnerable in Scotland. Southern English MPs described the Scottish Office budget as a 'slush fund', and argued that Scots were being 'force-fed' with public expenditure. This interest has deepened as a direct result of the public debate over devolution (Midwinter, 1989). Although the author focuses here on developments in Scotland, many of the issues are relevant to devolution proposals in Wales, Northern Ireland and perhaps the English regions also.     

The pathfinder process in Northern Ireland

Government has many customers — not just the individual citizen, but also corporate customers from the private sector. Getting close to those customers will require changes in the nature of public sector culture. Below are two examples — the first from Northern Ireland and the second from Whitehall — of government departments which have tried to change the way in which they do things.     

Sustainable procurement in health and social care in Northern Ireland

This article reports on a sustainable public procurement project in Northern Ireland. The authors found that limited official guidance was available, especially on equality; nevertheless staff had positive attitudes and sustainability criteria were being embedded in procurement processes. While there is a need to overcome limited knowledge on social aspects and whole life costing, sustainable procurement was found to be compatible with efficiency. Sustainable procurement, if used effectively by confident and well-qualified staff, can achieve not only sustainability goals but also those relating to efficiency and economic recovery.     

Co-design,evaluation and the Northern Ireland Innovation Lab

Around the world there are more than 100 policy labs—multi-disciplinary government teams developing public services and policies using innovation methods to engage citizens and stakeholders. These policy labs use a range of innovation methods and approaches, including co-production, co-creation, co-design, behavioural insights, systems thinking, ethnography, data science, nudge theory and lean processes. Although the methods may vary, one element is consistent: policy labs actively, creatively and collaboratively engage the public and a wide range of stakeholders in jointly developing solutions. The Northern Ireland Public Sector Innovation Lab (iLab) is part of a growing UK and international community of policy labs using co-design to engage with users for value co-creation, aiming to improve public governance by creating a safe space to generate ideas, test prototypes and refine concepts with beneficiaries. Drawing on iLab’s experience, this paper explores three questions: What are the main determinants of effective co-design? What are the unintended consequences of co-design? And what lessons can be learned from iLab and shared with other policy labs?     

An Assessment of Competitive Tendering using Transaction Cost Analysis

Competitive tendering is the means by which most goods and services are produced by public bodies: therefore it is important to try to improve it. Transaction cost analysis, in particular the concepts of bounded rationality, asset specificity and opportunism, provided the framework for examining two competitively tendered contracts let by the Government Purchasing Agency (in Northern Ireland). The firms tendering for the contracts were surveyed and interviews were carried out with purchasing staff managing the tendering process. The authors found that the main areas for further improvement in competitive tendering are the availability of information on previous contracts and debriefing, providing a clearer specification of user needs and of quantities.     

The actual evaluation of school PFI bids for value for money in the UK public sector

Much of the literature on value for money (VFM) evaluation of private finance initiative (PFI) contracts has concentrated on the financial methodology of constructing the public sector comparator (PSC) and its limitations. In contrast, this paper focuses on examining how ‘PFI bids’ are actually evaluated for VFM in the case of three secondary school PFI contracts. It is a unique study which presents the Northern Ireland school PFI decision-making processes, within the broader UK context. It is based on the full business cases of three PFI schools and interviews with key actors involved in the PFI processes. This study shows that the methodology used to evaluate and benchmark the design, facilities management, financial and contractual aspects of PFI bids for VFM is subjective and problematic-changes in the assumptions used may easily shift the balance in favour of conventional procurement and/or competing private sector service providers. It further highlights the importance of risk transfer; how non-financial factors are taken into consideration; and the public sector's reliance on consulting firms and ‘accounting measures’ in the PFI decision-making processes.     

Prudence and financial self-regulation in credit unions in Northern Ireland

Credit unions in Northern Ireland are subject to a unique combination of statutory oversight and self-regulation. This paper investigates the association between prudence and the monitoring of financial ratios by credit union trade associations. We find that compliance with the mandated level of capital reserves is uniformly high, regardless of the existence or extent of self-regulation. However, after controlling for cross-sectional differences in profitability, age, size, growth and common bond type a positive association exists between self-regulation and financial ratios measuring prudence and loan book quality. These findings have policy implications for the regulation of credit unions in Northern Ireland and elsewhere regarding potential regulatory cost savings from reliance on self-regulation provided by trade associations.     

Rationalizing Northern Ireland Hospital Services Towards Larger Providers: Best-Practice Efficiency Studies and Current Policy

This article explores the relative efficiency of Northern Ireland hospitals, and in particular the efficiency of small hospitals relative to their large counterparts, employing a technique called data envelopment analysis. The empirical analysis revealed that larger hospitals displayed higher cost efficiency, higher allocative efficiency and higher technical efficiency than their smaller counterparts. These results support Northern Ireland's recent strategy of concentrating hospital services in six large hospitals, supported by medium sized hospitals, and closing or restructuring smaller hospitals.     

爱尔兰、英国税务信息化建设概览

爱尔兰和英国都是全球电子政务发展水平处于领先地位的国家,其税务信息化的成功经验对于快速成长和发展中的中国税务信息化建设具有十分积极的借鉴意义。本文介绍了两国税务信息化建设的思路和实践情况,并围绕我国税务系统如何策略地运用信息技术手段,最大限度地把信息系统所蕴涵的可创造价值机会转变成税收管理的现实成果,全面推进税务管理的现代化建设,以及如何在信息化建设过程中转变建设理念,改变传统建设模式,提高信息化建设有效性等问题,提出了新的思路。     

Competitive Bidding and Regional Development in the UK

This article examines competitive bidding among development agencies. Some commentators argue that English regions are at a disadvantage compared with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The authors look at the evidence on the attraction of FDI to the regions of the UK and discuss some of the arguments about unfair advantage. The impact of the Regional Development Agencies on FDI and the need for a concordat are also discussed.     

Reforming anti‐discrimination legislation: Fair enough?

Despite years of anti religious and political discrimination legislation, Catholics in Northern Ireland still suffer substantially higher levels of unemployment than Protestants. The Government's proposals to strengthen the existing legislation, while welcome, are a disappointment to those statutory bodies which are responsible for eliminating other forms of discrimination.     

New training proposals for Northern Ireland

Industrial training, particularly the relatively poor British performance, has received publicity in recent years. The Northern Ireland Department of Economic Development has published a consultative paper with proposals for reforming the Province's training structure. There may be lessons in it for improving the industrial training system elsewhere in the United Kingdom.     

Granger-causality in peripheral EMU public debt markets: A dynamic approach

Our research aims to analyze the possible existence of Granger-causal relationships in the behavior of public debt issued by peripheral member countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with special emphasis on the recent episodes of crisis triggered in the eurozone sovereign debt markets since 2009. With this goal in mind, we make use of a database of daily frequency of yields on 10-year government bonds issued by five EMU countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain), covering the entire history of the EMU from its inception on 1 January 1999 until 31 December 2010. In the first step, we explore the pair-wise Granger-causal relationship between yields, both for the whole sample and for changing subsamples of the data, in order to capture the possible time-varying causal relationship. This approach allows us to detect episodes of significant increase in Granger-causality between yields on bonds issued by different countries. In the second step, we study the determinants of these episodes, analyzing the role played by different factors, paying special attention to instruments that capture the total national debt (domestic and foreign) in each country.     

Churches and charity regulation: 1993–2009

This article explores the impact of charity law and regulation on churches in the period 1993–2009 in the jurisdictions of England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. In the past, churches have often escaped the full requirements of charity regulation on issues such as registration, reporting, and accountability to regulators. Many of these exemptions have been removed as a result of modernization of charity law throughout the UK, and the implications of these changes are explored both normatively and qualitatively.     

Value for money: a broken piñata?

In public management a key driver of effectiveness is value for money (VfM). This paper argues that the VfM concept suffers from conceptual ambiguity, and thus ethical implications arise when VfM is used to legitimize public buying decisions. A conceptual framework, which clarifies properties and boundaries of VfM, is proposed. Empirical data collected from public employees involved in public procurement in Ireland and a perceptual map of subjective meaning and impact of VfM are discussed. While the conceptual framework is broadly supported, it highlights different interpretations of VfM and distinguishes those employees who dent the VfM piñata from those who break it. The implications of the research in this paper include a need for more debate concerning the usefulness of the VfM concept.     

The Pricing of IPOs Post-Sarbanes-Oxley

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) imposes new requirements for firms going public. Many provisions of SOX should improve the transparency of U.S. firms going public and therefore reduce the uncertainty surrounding their valuation. We find that initial returns of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the United States have declined since SOX. Furthermore, the aftermarket performance of IPOs since SOX is significantly higher. While the expense of public reporting has increased in the United States because of SOX, the valuations of newly public firms at the time of the IPO are subject to less uncertainty and smaller aftermarket corrections.     

Does the ECB act as a lender of last resort during the subprime lending crisis?: Evidence from monetary policy reaction models

We investigate whether the ECB aligns its monetary policy with financial crisis risk in EMU member countries. We find that since the outbreak of the subprime crisis the ECB has significantly increased net lending and reduced interest rates when banking and sovereign debt crisis risk in vulnerable EMU countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) increases, while no significant effect is identified for the pre-crisis period and relatively tranquil EMU countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands). These findings suggest that the ECB acts as a Lender of Last Resort for vulnerable EMU countries.     

Novel approaches to the regulatory control of financial services providers: The importance of cultural context

This study investigates the effectiveness of a public sector financial management initiative. Specifically, the powers awarded to the Irish Financial Services Ombudsman (FSO) in 2013 to name and shame malfeasance by financial service providers (FSPs) in its annual reports. As the first country to award such powers to its public sector financial ombudsman, Ireland represents a novel setting in which to test the impact of regulatory disclosure as a way to promote accountability and transparency. Our results show that the number of complaints lodged against malfeasants dropped in the immediate aftermath of this and, following a one-year lag, so did the percentage of complaints lodged that proceeded to a full investigation and legally binding finding. Despite the failure of such strategies in some jurisdictions, the Irish experience indicates that regulatory disclosure can, in line with Neo-Durkheimian institutional theory and consistent with the accounting and accountability literature, have considerable impact where and when contextual preconditions are met. These findings have important implications for the operationalisation of regulatory disclosure as an accountability enhancing measure in other jurisdictions.     

New development: Policy tsars—Whitehall's expert advisers revealed

The number of tsars in government acting as external experts has been steadily growing. Policy tsars are mostly businessmen and retired public servants. They are left free to work as they wish, so their practices vary greatly. In consequence, issues of propriety (since these are public appointments) and effectiveness (since they advise ministers very directly) arise.