What kinds of policies can governments adopt to attract, retain, motivate and develop qualified teachers in elementary and secondary schools? The project will pursue two avenues to address this question. The first component will study the effect of recent reforms on the teaching profession in four countries. Some of these reforms involve increases in compensation linked to specific teacher beha...

We present historical data on sovereign bond spreads drawn from 300 years of data (from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century), which appear to be inconsistent with the North and Weingast (1989) view that institutional changes and reforms can reduce the cost of government debt soon after they are implemented. Extended time series data on British government debt from the lat...

Purpose: This paper addresses whether and how the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002(SOX) affects shareholder wealth (firm value) by focusing on the trade-off between improved corporate governance leading to a lower cost of capital and increased managerial compliance costs of regulations. Design/Methodology: We use an analytical model of solving the management utility maximization function and the cha...

All levels of government have begun to pursue results-based reforms, which assume that managers will use performance information to make better decisions. However, reforms have neglected the insights of a large and relevant literature on organizational learning. This article revisits this literature, treating results-based reform as an organizational learning mechanism and a deliberate structur...

Poverty can be defined as the inability to achieve a certain minimal standard of living. With the severe economic shocks that rocked the Nigerian economy during the early 1980s came real and perceived increases in the level of poverty in the country. Among the factors contributing to the shocks were declining prices of oil, the country's main export, and rises in real international interest rat...

Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa--the countries known as BRICS--represent some of the world's fastest growing large economies and nearly 40% of the world's population. Over the last two decades, BRICS have undertaken health-system reforms to make progress towards universal health coverage. This paper discusses three key aspects of these reforms: the role of governme...

Despite the burgeoning number of studies of public sector information systems, very few scholars have focussed on the relationship between e-Government policies and information systems choice and design. Drawing on Fountain’s (2001) technology enactment framework, this paper endeavours to conduct an in-depth investigation of the intricacies characterising the choice and design of new technologi...

The Chilean health care system has been intensively reformed in the past 20 years. Reforms under the Pinochet government (1973-1990) aimed mainly at the decentralization of the system and the development of a private sector. Decentralization involved both a deconcentration process and the devolution of primary health care to municipalities. The democratic governments after 1990 chose to preserv...

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policymakers as their agents, and policy-makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated b...

The health sector, a foremost service sector in Nigeria, faces a number of challenges; primarily, the persistent under-funding of the health sector by the Nigerian government as evidence reveals low allocations to the health sector and poor health system performance which are reflected in key health indices of the country.Notwithstanding, there is evidence that the private sector could be a key...