Towards Legitimate Water Governance?

Abstract

This article addresses how and to what extent a governance mode can legitimately provide public services. A single case study of the partially privatized Berlin Waterworks is used to analyse the level of input and output legitimacy as well as potential trade-offs between the criteria emerging in a public–private partnership (PPP) in the water supply and sanitation sectors. While the Berlin Waterworks as a PPP leads to a lower level of resource protection and public acceptance, it leads to a higher level of efficiency and profitability than under the previous public model.     

Towards redressing historical inequities?

Abstract

This article examines women's positions at senior management levels of South Africa's civil service given its affirmative action policy that attempts to tackle women's historical marginalization in public sector organizations. It examines ‘women's empowerment', gender and race inside the public service within the context of South Africa's historical inequities within the civil service, and the post-apartheid government's attempts to correct these. It concludes that women's positions inside the civil service have improved gradually since the demise of apartheid, an initial step towards substantive equality with their male counterparts, but recognizes that much still needs to be done if women are to be represented proportionately in senior civil service positions. It argues that this might help to improve the implementation of gender sensitive programs at various policy levels. Information for this article was gathered from various sources including interviews with civil servants in selected national and provincial departments.     

Corporate Governance and the Environment: What Type of Governance Creates Greener Companies?

We build on a stakeholder–agency theoretical perspective to explore the impact of particular corporate governance mechanisms on firm environmental performance. Our empirical evidence shows that several important corporate governance mechanisms such as the board of directors, managerial incentives, the market for corporate control, and the legal and regulatory system determine firms' environmental performance levels. These results suggest that these different governance mechanisms resolve, to some extent, the existing divergence of interests between stakeholders and managers with respect to environmental activities.     

A Perfect Impasse? Cuba's Move Towards the Market and the United States' Move Towards Cuba

This article first analyses the internal economic trajectory of the Cuban economic reforms and evaluates their effectiveness in delivering the extensive and intensive development needed to correct Cuba's structural and economic imbalances. It concludes that without the lifting of the US economic sanctions success will at best be only partial, with serious implications for long‐term stability. The article then evaluates the reasons for the US economic sanctions against Cuba and argues that while the embargo policy might have failed to topple the Cuban communist regime, it has served other, largely unacknowledged, purposes that are important in explaining why the policy has persisted. The article concludes by suggesting that the US is not likely to jettison the sanctions regime while Cuba's single‐party, state‐led economic system remains. At the same time, Cuba is not likely to jettison its single‐party system while the sanctions remain.     

Accountability – are We Better off Without It?

Abstract

Public managers increasingly lament about negative effects of accountability. Despite these reports and the importance of accountability in public organizations, it is yet unknown when it has positive or negative effects on managers. Overcoming two major obstacles in accountability research, this study therefore investigates ‘how accountability affects public manager's work behaviour’. Firstly, this study applies a cognitive theory offering a promising way out of the current theoretical dead-end. Secondly, the quasi-experimental research design makes the complex concept of accountability more tangible and findings transferable to practice. Moreover, individual level characteristics such as motivation are used to investigate a potential interaction between contingency and individual level characteristics. Results indicate both positive and negative effects of accountability on work behaviour and hence strongly challenge the positive normative connotation of accountability.     

Environmental,Social and Governance investing: Does rating matter?

In the last decade, the demand for sustainable and social investments has improved. The mutual funds industry has responded to market needs by offering a number of investment products focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) companies. The aim of this article is to understand if an ESG score can actually be considered a valid criterion that portfolio managers could adopt, along with traditional risk–return optimisation, in selecting asset portfolios. The paper analyses the link between the performance and the ESG score of different sectoral portfolios (one for each sector of the Global Industry Classification Standard), entirely composed of ESG assets, in the search for a clear and strong positive correlation that could suggest an overall advantage to focus on an ex ante choice of assets with high ESG scores.     

Regulatory Uncertainty: A Reason to Postpone Investments? Not Necessarily

There is a polarity in the literature as to whether companies do or do not postpone investment decisions in the light of regulatory uncertainty. In the case of flexible regulation characterized by a high degree and discontinuous resolution of uncertainty, we show that companies do not necessarily postpone investment decisions. We trace this observation back to three motivations: securing competitive resources, leveraging complementary resources, and alleviating institutional pressure. We connect these motivations to fundamental principles of the resource-based view and institutional theory and further show the existence of a regime where institutionally motivated and resource-based actions are not necessarily decoupled. We base our research on a case study covering 80 per cent of the German power generation industry which faces regulatory uncertainty from the European CO₂ Emission Trading Scheme.     

Governance Restructuring in Los Angeles and Toronto: Amalgamation or Secession?

Towards the end of the 1990s, a perplexing situation occurred in two large North American cities. In Toronto, Ontario, and Los Angeles, California, conservative political forces undertook to restructure the system of urban governance. While initiated by conservatives in both cases, in Toronto the result was consolidation; in Los Angeles secessionism is rampant. In both cases the political debate on amalgamation and secession is tied in with discourses on size, efficiency and form of urban government. In both cases, also, the shift from government to governance has been a central theme. This article investigates how local governance has changed in these two cities by comparing historical traditions of governance. Each city has a specific set of external relationships with other geographical and political scales and a set of characteristic internal contradictions. Internally, Los Angeles' tradition of splintered governance stands in contrast to Toronto's metropolitan governance model. Amalgamation and secession have been introduced as strategic options of governance restructuring in both cities in the late 1990s. Both (projected and realized) scalar changes of governance processes and institutions have been accompanied and characterized by social struggles and widespread political debate. The article outlines these debates and discusses the respective political alliances which have formed in both urban regions on the issue of amalgamation/secession. Vers la fin des années 1990, une situation troublante se produisit dans deux grandes villes d'Amérique du Nord: Toronto, en Ontario, et Los Angeles, en Californie. Les conservateurs y avaient entrepris de restructurer le système de gouvernance urbaine. Bien que l'initiative revienne aux mêmes forces politiques dans les deux cas, le résultat fut à Toronto une unification et à Los Angeles un sécessionnisme rampant. Dans les deux villes, le débat politique sur l'amalgamation et la sécession est lié aux discours sur la taille, l'efficacité et la forme d'un gouvernement urbain. De même, dans les deux villes, le passage de gouvernement à gouvernance s'est trouvé au centre des propos. Cet article recherche comment la gouvernance locale a évolué dans ces deux villes en comparant les traditions historiques. Chaque ville présente, d'une part, un ensemble particulier de relations extérieures avec d'autres échelles géographiques et politiques et, d'autre part, un ensemble de contradictions intérieures caractéristiques. Sur le plan intérieur, la tradition de gouvernance éclatée de Los Angeles s'oppose au modèle de gouvernance métropolitaine de Toronto. Vers la fin des années 1990, amalgamation et sécession ont été présentées dans les deux villes comme des options stratégiques pour la restructuration de la gouvernance. Les changements d'échelle –à la fois prévus et réalisés – concernant les processus et institutions de gouvernance ont été accompagnés et caractérisés par des conflits sociaux et un débat politique général. L'article expose ces discussions et aborde les alliances politiques respectives qui se sont formées dans les deux zones urbaines sur la question d'amalgamation/sécession.     

Capital Structure and Regulation: Do Ownership and Regulatory Independence Matter?

We study the effect of ownership structure and regulatory independence on the interaction between capital structure and regulated prices using a comprehensive panel data of publicly traded European utilities. We find that firms in our sample tend to have a higher leverage if they are privately controlled and regulated by an independent regulatory agency. Moreover, the leverage of these firms has a positive and significant effect on their regulated prices, but not vice versa. Our results are consistent with the theory that privately controlled regulated firms use leverage strategically to obtain better regulatory outcomes.     

Does Board Independence Affect Audit Fees? Evidence from Recent Regulatory Reforms

To enhance board oversight, since 2002, US legislation has required listed companies to have a majority independent board. This paper uses this legislative change to examine the relation between board independence and audit fees. To provide a clean estimate of this relation, we adopt a difference-in-difference approach using a sample matched on client firm characteristics. We find that greater board independence is insignificantly associated with a change in audit fees when client firms operate in a weak information environment. When the information environment is strong, greater board independence is associated with an increase in audit fees. Our results are consistent with the nascent theory emphasizing information asymmetry and provide insight into the effectiveness of the mandated board independence in relation to audit quality.     

College Readiness: Are California Charter School Students Better Prepared?

Using US data from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) I analyse student outcomes from Advanced Placement tests and Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments to determine whether charter school students display higher levels of college readiness. Using panel data from 2011–12 through 2014–15 for the Advanced Placement tests, I find a gain of between 10.8 and 21.0 percentage points for charter students on average over students attending traditional public schools. For the Smarter Balanced Assessment using school years 2014–15 and 2015–16, I again find that charter students outperform traditional public students on average with gains in all categories for both the English and the mathematics portions of the exam. The results of this study seem to offer some support for the view that offering choice in schooling tends to improve performance.     

Better Place继续试验

这家公司的电动车运营模式要能够真正开展,还将是一个漫长的过程,没有人敢保证它会成功,但是如果我们就此望而却步,那就再无成功可能。     

Governance infrastructure and indebtedness of African countries: Do regional blocs matter?

Motivated by the intermediating role of good institutions in enabling growth via external debt financed investment and the touted promise of regional integration for Africa's growth prospect, we use data on 37 countries, over the period 2002–2010, to explore the governance institutions—external indebtedness nexus in Africa, at the regional bloc level. We find a robust negative relation between governance institutions and external indebtedness in East & Horn of Africa, Central Africa and Southern Africa; and unclear relationships in North and West Africa regions. Importantly, these baseline results are robust to the consideration of debt write-offs, natural resource rents, and endogeneity. Further, we find that geographic, economic and cultural factors of proximity, intra-regional activity, shared official language, legal origin and dominant religion, largely explain the commonality of Africa's regional blocs of countries. These and other results of the study can support potential external debt management strategy that leverages effective governance institutions and enhanced regional economic integration.     

What Governance Roles do Municipalities use in Dutch Local Social Support Networks?

Abstract

Until now, there is no consensus about variations in governance roles. This consensus is necessary to enable researchers to examine how network are governed well. In this article, the governance roles are considered to be clusters of consistent choices on a top-down versus bottom-up continuum, regarding nine governance activities. Our results reveal that three governance roles can be discerned: top-down, intermediate and bottom-up governance roles. Furthermore, these roles are applied by municipalities with specific (network) characteristics. Our results open the black box of network governance and might facilitate municipalities to make choices regarding their role in the new network era.     

Corporate Governance Viability： Theoretical Exploration

The purpose of this exploratory paper is to try to envision how corporate governance systems and practices are evolving and what eventually determines the forms they take and the functions they perform. Practical implications especially concern different consequences that recent global economic crisis has imposed on regulatory, business, and social aspects of corporate governance. In order to encompass different approaches to this ongoing issue, the author takes into account mainly theoretical contributions that address the issue from the following perspectives： interrelations between product market competition and corporate governance, assessment of capital market pressures on corporate governance; relation between labour market and corporate governance; and actors influencing corporate governance changes in national systems of corporate governance. Since the viability of any corporate governance system and practice, at national and international levels, depends on their ability to respond to both market pressure towards competitiveness and diversified requirements by influential social, political, and economic actors of change, the author suggests that all groups of factors should continue to be in the focus of future researches. On the other hand, as global economic crisis differently affects different countries and businesses, it is of particular importance for those that shape corporate governance policies and practices to be aware of the deep relatedness between corporate governance, on the one hand, and economic, social, and environmental aspects of growth and development, on the other hand.     

Supply management in American public administration: Towards an academic discipline?

This article examines the development of supply management in the U.S. to assess its progress towards academic disciplinary status. A comparison of the fields of business administration and public administration indicates that supply management is more developed in the former than in the latter, which inhibits its disciplinary status. Various reasons for this uneven development in the two fields are explored. The paper argues that a paradigm shift must occur for public supply management, which will re-orient it around the concept of the public interest. This will require public supply professionals to participate strategically in public policy-making in order to ascertain and promote the public interest. A policy framework is used to illustrate this re-orientation and to suggest directions for further research.