Indigenous Peoples’ Health Care: New approaches to contracting and accountability at the public administration frontier

Abstract

This article analyses reforms to contracting and accountability for indigenous primary health care organizations in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The reforms are presented as comparative case studies, the common reform features identified and their implications analysed.

The reforms share important characteristics. Each proceeds from implicit recognition that indigenous organizations are ‘co-principals’ rather than simply agents in their relationship with government funders and regulators. There is a common tendency towards more relational forms of contracting; and tentative attempts to reconceptualize accountability. These ‘frontier’ cases have broad implications for social service contracting.     

Administrative tradition and management reforms: a comparison of agency chief executive accountability in four Continental Rechtsstaat countries

This article investigates perceived accountability patterns of national agencies’ chief executives in four countries with a Rechtsstaat tradition and tests theoretical expectations about potential tensions between managerial reforms and administrative values using survey data (N = 453). All countries combine old and new forms of accountability requirements, while legal and financial accountability have not been replaced with results accountability. Switzerland and the Netherlands score highest on results accountability, though in combination with legal and financial accountability, which are dominant in Germany and Austria. Nation-specific characteristics seem more important for core values of public administration than generic characteristics of the Rechtsstaat model.     

中小出口企业不可忽视贸易壁垒新动向

随着关税壁垒以及许可证、配额等传统非关税壁垒的门槛逐步降低,形形色色的新贸易壁垒逐渐升级,SA8000社会责任标准就是一个典型的例子,并且已对我国农产品和劳动密集型企业的外贸出口产生了影响。所以,尽快认识贸易壁垒新动向,了解其特征和发展趋势,对我国众多劳动密集型中小企业的外贸业务发展有着重要的意义。     

Extinction accounting and accountability: Empirical evidence from the west European tissue industry

Recently, human activities are more and more invasive with respect to biodiversity. Several studies highlighted the key role played by accountants in contributing to the development of tools able to support company in assessing, reporting, and disseminating, as well as accomplishing, the preservation of natural species and ecosystems (King and Atkins, 2016). Corporate reporting of environmental information might increase the credibility of forest certifications, given that some scholars argued that certified forests are not often run, in a sustainable way. Moreover, certifications sometimes cover harmful forest practices (Elad, 2014) and do not ensure a good quality of environmental reporting and performance. The research question therefore intends to explore how extinction accounting and accountability (EAA) is able to reflect ex post the company's business strategy and, at the same time, influence ex ante its formulation by easing the prevention of deforestation risk and addressing the issue of credibility through specific actions. In more detail, the “Emancipatory Framework for Extinction Accounting and Accountability” (EFEAA) (Atkins and Maroun, 2018) was tested using content and interpretative analyses based on the reports inherent to top four companies working in West Europe in the tissue industry, where the preservation of forest heritage is a “compulsory route” for assuring the business sustainability, in terms of both raw material renewal and brand reputation. The findings highlighted the first attempt to carry out a qualitative research over the management of forest issues. In our study, companies tend to report advantages arising from the use of forest, but this kind of disclosure is too generic without providing evidence over the ecosystem services forests produce. Moreover, firm size affects the quantity and the quality of disclosure. At last, managerial implications and future research avenues are outlined and discussed.     

上市公司社会责任报告解读与完善建议

国内关于社会责任信息披露的研究主要以年报为主，本文以（2006年20份专门的社会责任报告为研究对象，对报告进行内容分析和整体质量解读。本文认为，社会责任报告是公司传递社会责任信息的有效途径，政策指引对相关披露具有良好的引导推动作用，并且公司之间形成了披露的示范效应；但也发现公司对社会责任理解存在偏差、披露缺乏中立性、形式重于实质等问题。本文最后提出了完善社会责任报告的建议与思考。     

Reflexive Interdisciplinary Research: The Making of a Research Programme on the Rural Economy and Land Use

This paper provides an account of the origins and formation of the UK Research Councils’ Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme and its approach to promoting interdisciplinary working between social and natural scientists. The programme is set in the context of broader developments in science policy, including a policy discourse centred upon sustainable development and the knowledge economy and associated demands for greater accountability in science. Interdisciplinarity promises research that will be more relevant and responsive to public needs and concerns. In describing the provenance of the RELU programme, therefore, the paper seeks to lay out the different stages in its initiation and design to show how, to varying degrees, these were open to external scrutiny and influence. The process of developing the programme illustrates that it is not straightforward to make research agendas and funding more transparent and accountable. It also provides insights into the challenges that interdisciplinarity and accountability present to established science institutions.     

Perverse Audit Culture and Accountability of the Modern Public University

The audit culture which has developed in public universities has led to counter‐productive outcomes. Managerial oversight of academic work has reached a critical tipping point. Extensive auditing of research output by means of performance management assessment regimes motivated by a New Public Management mentality has damaged individual scholarship and threatened academic freedom. Such assessment regimes are perverse and conducive to the development of psychotic tendencies by universities. It is important to understand the effects of a perverse audit culture when re‐thinking and reforming approaches to university performance management. We suggest ways for public universities to acknowledge the need for accountability while remaining true to core academic purposes.     

Splitting Accountability Hairs: Anomalies in the Adaptation of IFRS for SMEs in the UK and Ireland

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a significant shift in the financial reporting frameworks available in the UK and Ireland affecting entities of all sizes with the Financial Reporting Council issuing three financial reporting standards replacing the extant UK GAAP. This paper reports the results of a content analysis of 151 comment letters sent to the standard-setter in response to its policy proposal. The paper explains why the standard-setter stepped back from its controversial proposal to enforce IFRS for SMEs based on the absence of public accountability. Additionally, the standard-setter addressed all concerns positively apart from two, representing two anomalies. First, despite being opposed by the majority of the respondents, the standard-setter published a new framework for wholly-owned subsidiaries of listed companies allowing them to make substantially less disclosure. Second, the standard-setter is yet to respond to the call by the accounting profession and the Not-for-profit sector to publish a sector-specific framework.     

Reelection,growth and public debt

In this work we examine how economic growth affects public debt when interacted with reelection prospects. Reelection considerations shorten political time horizons and give rise to political myopia that exacerbates debt accumulation. That laxer institutional reelection restrictions (e.g., no term limits) mitigate this effect due to electoral accountability is well known. Incorporating growth, we find that this mitigation can be reversed because less myopic, and more accountable, incumbents put more emphasis on smoothing the effects of growth across generations. We test these predictions using an annual-based panel of U.S. states over the period 1963–2010. Our identification strategy rests on constitutionally-entrenched differences in gubernatorial term limits that provide plausibly exogenous variation in reelection prospects, and aggregate national TFP shocks that are exogenous to individual states. Our estimates indicate that when reelection is possible a one standard deviation positive income shock induces, within the same year, a relative increase of approximately $40 in real per capita public debt.     

Monetary policy for emerging market economies: beyond inflation targeting

Monetary policymakers normally seek to achieve multiple objectives: for prices as well as real economic activity, sometimes for the composition of real activity as well as the aggregate, and often for aspects of the economy's international balance. The fact that monetary policy has only one basic instrument to use therefore creates both complexity and tensions among these objectives. Although inflation targeting represents a way of imposing a logical consistency on monetary policy, in the presence of multiple policy objectives inflation targeting undermines policy transparency and therefore makes accountability more difficult too. Because of the limitation of monetary policy's having only one instrument, but multiple objectives, fiscal policy and prudential supervision and regulation of financial institutions are also important for enabling emerging market economies to achieve their macroeconomic aims.