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The goal of this paper is to provide tools to understand and analyse waves of "agencification" in transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Agencification is a shorthand for the process of delegation and devolution, in which more autonomy, particularly in personnel and financial issues, is granted to public bodies, which either remain legally part of the state or acquire their own legal personality. It can also mean creating or moving functions to bodies, which are subsidiary or separate from ministries/departments (Gill, 2002). In transition countries, most public organisations inherited a legal personality already from communism, with consequences which are both procedural and substantive. Therefore, agencification in transition countries usually means the creation of new autonomous bodies for new functions or a significant increase in the autonomy of existing legally separate bodies either on an individual or a collective basis.

Hospitals are the most expensive component of OECD health care systems, accounting for around one third of total health care expenditure. Given growing pressures on government budgets, this is an area of expenditure that has already been, and will continue to be, thoroughly scrutinised for potential increases in efficiency. One way to assess hospital efficiency is to measure the amount of resources each hospital uses to treat specific conditions. A care delivery process may be seen as more efficient – after accounting for broader health system and market factors that may constrain the hospital from operating at an efficient level – if it consumes fewer resources while delivering adequate care for the same condition, the dimension of efficiency under review here. In this light, measuring hospital length of stay and costs for a given condition helps the understanding of how efficient (better performing) hospitals are relative to each other. Through international comparative work, this paper helps policy makers understand the scope and nature of length of stay/costs variation across hospitals in OECD countries. It also explores whether characteristic of hospitals or of countries' regulatory and operating environments can explain differences in efficiency. Data on length of stay and costs to treat patients admitted to hospitals for nine tracing conditions/treatments were collected and analysed for Canada (Alberta province), France, Ireland and Israel for 2012-2014. Our analysis shows that hospitals with a number of beds ranging between 200 and 600, and not-for-profit hospitals report shorter length of stay and lower costs for several conditions/treatments. It also shows that variations in efficiency are more likely to exist at the hospital level for cardiac surgery (acute myocardial infarction with percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty and coronary artery bypass graft), and at country level for hysterectomy, caesarean section and normal delivery. These results shed some light on the importance of hospital payment system in fostering efficiency in care delivery for standard/high volume treatments such as normal delivery, whereas hospital management and organisation seem to drive efficiency for more complex/technology driven treatments such as bypass surgery.

This paper analyses the impact of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) extensions on jobseeker households in selected US states and examines how these extensions compare to the pre-pandemic policies. The analysis finds that PUA extensions increase benefit duration for all jobseekers, but due to interactions between other government benefits, this translates to significant increases in benefit generosity only for jobseekers without children. This has an impact on the financial incentives to take up employment, although incentives are still above the OECD average. PUA extensions have little impact for people who have been unemployed for a very long time, and jobseekers with no recent contribution history. PUA extensions also have minimal impact on jobless families with children who continue to receive less support compared to other OECD countries.

This paper shows that corporate tax provisions can lead to different effective tax rates (ETRs) if there is a capital cost-intensive and a variable cost-intensive way of producing the same output. It develops a framework for analysing sources of the difference in ETRs and adapts existing models to compare forward-looking ETRs for low-carbon and high-carbon electricity generation technologies, considering tax provisions for cost recovery in 36 countries. It finds that standard tax systems are technology neutral when investments are debt-financed because the deductibility of interest payments compensates for the fact that capital allowances are based on nominal (rather than real) capital costs. Under equity finance, ETRs are higher for investments in capital-cost-intensive technologies as the cost of equity finance is often not deductible. Since low-carbon electricity generation tends to be relatively capital-intensive, this result represents a form of unintentional misalignment of the corporate tax system with decarbonisation objectives,.

Trade globalisation is beginning to affect universities worldwide. In response to this outside pressure, institutions have become more geared to gaining international repute through research than to maintaining their reputation at home for the quality of their teaching. As a result of this focus on research, French universities, for example, are losing ground to other kinds of higher education institutions. One of the main reasons is that research encourages specialisation, whereas the market increasingly requires multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting skills. In order to explore how society’s contradictory demands can be met, two opposing models will be presented, one that seeks to preserve the universalist role of universities and another that would prompt higher education institutions to become increasingly specialised in pursuit of research excellence. Between these two extremes, there is perhaps a middle way that is difficult to follow, but that is exceptionally enriching for the university community, provided that university management is rethought. The primary mistake that can be made in any process of change is to seek to merge the role of individuals with that of institutions. Although universities can continue to pull together all the various threads that contribute to economic development, individuals cannot be expected to have the same multi-faceted profile. This means that the quality of tomorrow’s universities will depend on the quality of interpersonal relationships and how they are managed....

The last decade has seen a growing increase in policy discourse in many countries on entrepreneurship and innovation with a prominent emphasis on the role to be played by universities. However, it is far from clear to what extent institutional behaviours are influenced by this enterprising policy discourse based on the broad assumption that “knowledge” is the most precious asset for economic growth in the knowledge economy. This article examines the links developing between the universities and innovation processes especially at the regional level as observed in the United Kingdom, highlighting interactions between public policy and institutional behaviour in a multi-level governance (MLG) structure of knowledge production. Different strategic processes of networking between universities and the links universities are developing with Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and other partners in nine English regions are illustrated in light of recent government policies which influence the resources and strategies of universities. Universities need to be analysed as critical actors in regional development processes, and their wide range of activities and strategies at different geographical levels need to be strategically co-ordinated as part of a territorial development process within the globalising knowledge economy.

National and international rankings of institutional performance are playing a growing role in contemporary higher education. It is critical that researchers develop pragmatic, educationally sensitive and methodologically informed approaches for managing this aspect of higher education. This paper compares three approaches for modelling key indicators which underpin a national evaluation of university education in Australia: rankings of aggregate institutional performance; comparisons of institutional change over time; and performance variations within fields of education. The results show that simple institution-level aggregations are misleading, and that contemporary analytical methods must be used to account for the influence of fields of education. More broadly, the findings expose the need for a more robust methodological development of university rankings.

Globalisation is profoundly changing economic development, forcing development officials to adopt a regional approach founded on what a particular region does best or its competitive advantage. Globalisation has also placed a new premium on innovation as the critical fuel to economic success – for firms, regions and countries. Universities lie at the nexus of these two powerful trends: they are rooted in regions, and they are perhaps the most important engines of innovation. Drawing on recent experience in the United States, this paper explores this nexus by addressing three critical questions: (1) Why is regional competitiveness the new paradigm for regional development? (2) What must regions do to compete? (3) What can be done to connect university innovation with regional development? The paper concludes that new mechanisms are needed to connect university innovation with regional development. Public policy can encourage these mechanisms by addressing twin needs in the newly forming “market” for regional innovation: encouraging universities to make innovation available in ways that regions can easily tap, and helping regions understand which innovations are most critical to their economic future.

This paper analyses changes in the governance of universities as a result of growing demands from society as well as of a strong penetration of management ideology into all kinds of institutions. For this purpose the paper uses a theoretical framework focusing on two governance mechanisms in social systems: entry control and performance control. These belong to a larger set of homogenising forces, which the new institutionalists label as (1) coercive, (2) normative and (3) mimetic. Using this theoretical framework to analyse the development of Swedish universities, the author concludes that their governance has undergone a considerable change. Coercive forces that were previously exercised through detailed budgeting have, in recent years, been operating through representation in leading bodies and through the selection of university leaders. This has occurred through a crowding out of normative forces. At the same time there have been strong mimetic forces based on modern management ideas.