Search results for "Government"

The Role of Contextual Factors in the Influence of ICT on Street-Level Discretion

2017

Public service workers in the frontline have traditionally enjoyed a wide freedom to make decisions during policy implementation. Research shows that technology has both constraining and enabling effects on public service workers affecting their ability to exercise discretion. What remains unclear is under which circumstances discretion is influenced by technology. Using a case study approach and drawing on neo-institutional theory, this paper studies a court to identify contextual factors affecting the phenomenon. Findings show that technology has no unilateral effect on street-level discretion, and is found moderated by contextual factors such as the degree of social complexity in a case,…

Digitizing Discretionary Practices in Public Service Provision : An Empirical Study of Public Service Workers’ Attitudes

2019

E-Government's Role in Shifting the Paradigm of Performance in the Public Sector

2015

The emergence of e-government changed the world of the Public Administration (PA) and the discipline of Public Management dramatically. Through the presentation of a case- study of the municipality of Palermo, this article attempts to discuss the renewed need for assessing performance of e-government services in a local government and to disclose the main critical issues in accomplishing this evaluation. Palermo is experiencing the implementation of a second- generation e-government project that is embodied in the realization of a web portal. The conceptualization of a framework to assess the performance of the digital services appears to be crucial in order to improve the system and to avo…

La Nostra Escola Comarcal: An Educational Cooperative in Defense of Democratic, Active and Valencian Pedagogy (Spain 1973)

2015

This chapter presents the story of La Nostra Escola Comarcal, a school founded in 1973 in the Valencia Region of Spain while the country was still under the Franco dictatorship. At the school’s inception, a group of parents who participated in some of the more innovative educational experiences were seeking to provide their sons and daughters with a more democratic, co-educational experience that was grounded in the local culture and language. Since this kind of education was not possible within the hierarchical structure of public schools, they organized under the cooperative model securing both, the full participation of parents in the school and a democratic organizational model. Educati…

Documenting Napping: The Agentic Force of Documents and Human Action

2015

The article examines the question of the agentic force of documents in institutional practices and proposes a conceptual model of the agentic relation between documentation and human actors. For this aim, it presents an empirical case study of Finnish early childhood education and care. The study deals with individual education plans (IEPs), which are an example of child documentation that aims at an individualised and participatory pedagogy. The analytical focus is on a single topic of an IEP, the child’s afternoon naps, and how these are negotiated in the three-party encounter between a parent, a practitioner and the IEP document. The theoretical framework draws on the theories of documen…

Fiscal Policy Responsiveness, Persistence and Discretion

2008

This paper analyzes the different characteristics of fiscal policy using a two-step estimation procedure. First, we decompose both government spending and government revenue into three components: responsiveness, persistence and discretion. Second, we assess the determinants of these characteristics. Using data from 132 countries, our results show that fiscal policy is more persistent than responsive to economic conditions, which implies that the authorities may have less leeway in the short-run notably to curb spending behavior. In addition, countries characterized by greater fiscal persistence have less discretion and responsiveness. Finally, macroeconomic, institutional and geographic va…

The Effects of Taxation on Migration: Some Evidence for the ASEAN and APEC Economies

2010

This paper investigates the effects of taxation on migration. It develops a stylized, two-country model to examine the impact of taxes on labor mobility. The theoretical predictions that taxes affect migration decisions and that educated workers are more responsive to taxation are supported by some empirical evidence for the economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. The empirical application also shows that average tax rates have a larger impact on migration choices than marginal rates. Average tax rates are most important for migrants with secondary education, while marginal rates have a greater influence on the decisions of migrants…

Moving Towards E-Government in a Developing Society

2008

The use of information communication technologies (ICT) in governance is growing rapidly in many parts of the world. Developing countries in Africa are also making efforts to harness the new technology. In this chapter, we review the problems, progress, and prospects of e-government in Nigeria, a sub-Saharan African (SSA) country. Governments in the developing countries of SSA can benefit from e-government initiatives, as do their counterparts in advanced nations, when the concept of e-governments in SSA is understood, and concerted efforts are committed towards institutionalizing it in the region. This chapter provided useful insights in this regard. We discussed the contribution of the ch…

Health sector spending and spending on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and development assistance for health: progress towards Sustainable Devel…

2020

BACKGROUND: Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 aims to "ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages". While a substantial effort has been made to quantify progress towards SDG3, less research has focused on tracking spending towards this goal. We used spending estimates to measure progress in financing the priority areas of SDG3, examine the association between outcomes and financing, and identify where resource gains are most needed to achieve the SDG3 indicators for which data are available. METHODS: We estimated domestic health spending, disaggregated by source (government, out-of-pocket, and prepaid private) from 1995 to 2017 for 195 countries and territories. For …

Outsourcing within the Nordic context: Care services for older people in Finland.

2018

The early 1990s economic setback brought significant reforms favoring the outsourcing of care in Finnish municipalities. Here, outsourcing refers to the practice of municipalities employing private organizations through different means (e.g., open tendering) to deliver public care services. In this context, this study examines the growth in the outsourcing of service housing and home-help services in 311 municipalities from 2001 to 2015 and investigates the municipal factors associated with outsourcing using four dimensions: care needs, population size, economic situation, and political ideology of the municipality. The findings reveal a steep increase in the outsourcing of home-help and se…