Public spending,public governance and economic growth at the Vietnamese provincial level: A disaggregate analysis

This study examines the role of economic governance in the relationship between public spending, private investment, and economic growth in Vietnam at the provincial level. The study data consist of sixty-two Vietnamese provinces for the period 2006–2015. Some notable results are attained by applying a sequential (two-stage) estimation. First, the marginal benefits to economic growth of increased Vietnamese provincial government expenditures may be constrained because of the inefficiency of expenditures on education, business services, and public administration. Second, public spending and private investment are found to be substitutes at the provincial level. Third, based on the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) ranking, used as a proxy for provincial public governance in Vietnam, the significance of public governance can be observed. The study concludes that good governance, characterized by different attributes, such as lower informal charges, greater transparency, and unbiased policy, plays a critical role in improving the impact of government expenditure on economic growth in Vietnamese provinces, particularly through its interactions with private sector investment.     

Financial analyst coverage for U.S. firms facing foreign competition: Evidence from trade liberalization

This study examines financial analyst coverage for U.S. firms following an increase in foreign product market competition. To capture exogenous shocks to domestic firms' competitive environments, we exploit a quasi‐natural experiment from large import tariff reductions over the 1984 to 2005 period in the manufacturing sector. Using data for the years before and after large tariff reductions, our difference‐in‐differences analysis shows evidence of a significant decrease in analyst coverage for incumbent U.S. firms when they face greater entry threat from foreign competitors. We also find that analysts with less firm‐specific experience and less accurate prior‐period forecasts are more likely to stop following the domestic firm when foreign competition intensifies. Overall, the findings suggest that foreign product market competition from global trade liberalization is an important determinant of financial analysts' coverage decisions.     

Accounting for personal disposition and organizational context: connecting role ambiguity,public service motivation,and whistle-blowing in federal agencies

Abstract

Organizational psychologists and HRM scholars have long argued that prosocial organizational behaviors enhance organizational performance. However, prosocial behaviors are motivated by both self-interested and altruistic intent. Moreover, some have recognized that the factors that encourage shifts between egoistically and altruistically motivated prosocial behaviors may result from inherent tensions between individual disposition and situational contexts. As such, this study draws from literature examining prosocial behavior to evaluate whether work situations with clear task expectations dampen the extent to which prosocial personal dispositions diminish egoistically motivated prosocial behavior. Findings from a series of structural equation models reveal that altruistic dispositional traits diminish egoistic motives for engaging in one specific prosocial behavior, whistle-blowing. However, findings also reveal that work situations characterized by clear task expectations dampen the negative effect of altruistic dispositions on egoistically motivated whistle-blowing. Our findings imply that managers can adjust organizational contexts to capitalize on the enhanced benefits resulting from altruistically motivated prosocial behaviors.     

Grants-in-aid and election outcomes in recipient jurisdictions: The impact of EU funds on mayoral elections in Poland

We analyze the impact of EU funds on the outcomes of Polish mayoral elections in 2010 and 2014. We employ an instrumental variable approach to account for the endogeneity of EU funds. Our instruments approximate the availability of EU funds. The first instrument builds on the alignment of the local electorate with the regional donor government. The second instrument uses the funds spent in municipalities in the same sub-region dropped from the sample because the mayors do not run again. We do not find convincing empirical evidence in favor of the notion that EU funds increase the vote shares of mayors. We go on to test whether the electoral effect of EU funds is conditional on the attitude towards the donor institution among the population in the recipient population. This conditional factor is under-researched and politically virulent – given citizens’ skepticism towards the EU that Krastev (2017) describes for Central and Eastern European EU members. Our results are affirmative. EU funds increase the vote shares of mayors in municipalities where Krastev (2017) predicts the degree of EU skepticism to be low while they are not found to do so in municipalities where EU skepticism is predicted to be widespread. These results suggest that citizens’ attitudes towards the donor of vertical grants determine the political gains of recipients from using them.     

高校公共关系学专业课程体系改革问题研究

公共关系学专业在我国经历了十九年的专业建设,现今已经取得了显著成绩.但专业的课程体系问题一直存在,为了解决这一现实问题,本文从内蒙古高校公共关系学专业课程体系设置的现状人手,分析其存在的不足,提出相应的对策.旨在培养大批符合时代要求的公共关系专业人才.     

Mapping tax compliance: Assemblages,distributed action and practices: A new way of doing tax research

Tax compliance denotes the act of reporting and paying taxes in accordance with the tax laws. Current social science scholarship on tax compliance can almost entirely be divided into behavioural psychology analyses and critical tax studies. This article, which presents two cases of how tax compliance is constructed, challenges the explanatory reaches of today's social science approaches, arguing that an alternative approach to understanding tax compliance is worthwhile exploring. This other choice of approach, inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), adopts a more practice-oriented focus that studies tax compliance where it takes place as well as what it is made of. Consequently, this article argues that tax compliance is a socio-material assemblage and that complying is a distributed action. The article concludes by highlighting how an ANT approach contributes to the further theoretical development of social science studies of taxation.     

A ‘panoptical’ or ‘synoptical’ approach to monitoring performance? Local public services in England and the widening accountability gap

This article highlights how recent reforms to the auditing and assessment of local public services in England suggest there will be a shift from panoptical to ‘synoptical’ monitoring approaches. This is because the UK Government has abolished its centralised monitoring regime and instead required local authorities to publish a range of financial and performance datasets online, ostensibly so that citizens can hold organisations to account directly. However, the complexity and raw nature of these data, along with the sidelining of professional auditors, will result in most citizens being either unable or unwilling to undertake this task. As such, the proposed ‘synoptical’ approach will not materialise. Indeed, other legislative changes will mean that outsourcing firms effectively become the new, unaccountable observers of local public sector bodies within an enduring panoptical system. In many cases these companies will then assume responsibility for delivering the same services that they have assessed.     

Bringing back Thrift Week: Neo-liberalism and the rediscovery of thrift

The paper examines and compares the movements for promoting working-class savings in the modern USA and in Great Britain in the 19th century. It explores the use of savings as a technology for managing individuals’ behaviour and motives and the nature of the government objectives which are served by these parallel projects.     

Collaborative approaches to public sector innovation: A scoping study

In the last 15 years, European countries have invested considerable resources to provide e-government services. Despite of its increasing availability, its level of adoption has not been satisfying. On the other hand, over the last years, coinciding with the web 2.0 trend, the e-government services co-produced by citizens start to appear, often without the support, acknowledgement and even awareness of the government. This trend stems from a well-established tradition of offline co- production of public services, i.e. services provided by the voluntary sector, but brought to an unprecedented scale thanks to the advent of web 2.0. Still, the concept remains not well-defined and its impact is not yet well studied. The paper explores on a limited sets of cases what does it mean to collaboratively deliver online public services; what are the success factors based on the cases under study and what are the incentives for service providers (other than public administration), citizens as users and public administration. The authors propose an ostensive definition of the collaborative delivery of public services: collaborative public services are created and run by government, civil society or by private sector building on the re-use of government data or citizens data. Those services are focused on public goods delivery (e.g. health, education, public transport) and are meant to change the traditional government services by engaging in an open dialogue with public administration about the best way to deliver those services. The analysis of six case studies of innovative collaborative online public services suggests that the online collaborative public service delivery increases its quality with the users׳ growth contrary to the traditional offline service delivery. The study results indicate that the current developers interest lies in delivering complementary services to the government run services rather than substitutive services. The authors propose also the initial list of success factors, enabling conditions, and benefits for all main stakeholders (users, innovators and public administration).     

二元财政概念辨析--基于生产要素的视角

二元财政是与中国二元经济结构共生的一种制度安排,它与二元经济互为因果,互相作用。对应于生产函数,二元财政通过资金、劳动力、土地、制度四个要素实现资源配置向城市倾斜。从计划经济时期到市场经济时期,二元财政的变迁经历了一个由显性到隐性的过程,但至今依然存在。二元财政改革的难点是在公平和效率之间找到一个平衡点,推进城乡基本公共服务均等化;目标是助力二元结构转型。