Browse by: "2006"

This paper seeks to identify the way in which opportunities for corruption arise in the context of procurement. In looking at the government as a buyer, it considers the position of the procurement officer acting as agent on behalf of the elected government. Whilst the paper does not ignore the significant impact of corruption at the political level (either for the personal gain of politicians or for the benefit of political parties, for example), it concentrates on the opportunities this agency relationship offers to the procurement officer to deviate from his duty to act in the public interest. The paper investigates the divergence between the agent’s personal interest and that of the government and of the public and narrows down the opportunity for such deviations to the existence of informational asymmetries.

Top-down budgeting emerged in the 1990s as a response to fiscal crisis. Previously, the traditional bottom-up approach to budget formulation had conferred centralised authority for resource allocation on the finance ministry. Then, in an attempt to control the growing fiscal deficits in the 1990s, the finance ministry only set the overall expenditure ceiling and subceilings, and delegated detailed resource allocation decisions to line ministries. However, the level of delegation and the method of determining the expenditure ceilings vary across countries. This article describes country experiences with top-down budgeting and makes policy suggestions for its use as a tool for central resource management. The article also explores the relative advantages, disadvantages, and complementarities of the two approaches.

The Belgian government delegates some of its tasks to semi-public bodies in what is known as functional devolution. There are 15 public social security institutions in the sectors of employment and unemployment, pensions, family allowances, health and disability insurance.

Since 1992, the United Kingdom has used a new type of public-private partnership for the delivery of public services: the Private Finance Initiative. In the design of PFI projects, the assessment of risk, and who is best able to manage it, needs to be carefully considered.

This paper attempts to explain how the German higher education system strategically used quality assurance, through the new system of accreditation, to offer globally recognisable degrees such as the Bachelor's (Bakkalaureaus) and Master's (Magister) degrees. We also discuss the types of effects that this strategy has produced on the current structure of the German higher education system. In order to strengthen this discussion, the fundamental impacts of quality-related funding on the system's structure are scrutinised.

Many commentators have postulated a “financing gap” for small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs), meaning that there are significant numbers of SMEs that could use funds productively if they were available, but cannot obtain finance from the formal financial system. This article summarises an OECD report (OECD, 2006) on this topic which seeks to determine how prevalent such a gap may be – both in OECD countries and non-member economies – and recommends measures to foster an improved flow of financing to SMEs.

This paper addresses the debate on the third cycle of European higher education. Currently, much attention is paid to improving the structure and quality of doctorate education in the European context of the Bologna process and the Lisbon objectives. However, alternatives to the traditional doctorate are hardly addressed in the policy documents of governments and other agencies. The promise of one of these alternatives – the professional doctorate – is discussed. Without suggesting this alternative to be the ultimate solution to problems in the third cycle, the paper argues that a dual policy strategy seems appropriate: improving the traditional doctorate and allowing alternatives to flourish.