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This paper examines the relationship between industry profitability, sales to government, market structure, and firm size. The empirical results consistently show that government purchases of goods and services from the private sector significantly raise the profits of small firms across all industries, but that there is no significant relationship between large firm profitability and sales to government, even in highly concentrated industries. It is concluded that sales to government do not appear to facilitate collusion among large firms. Instead, the main impact of government purchases is to transfer wealth from the general taxpayer to small business. The problem implicitly raised by these remarks is why all sales to the government are not at collusive prices. Part of the answer is that the government is usually not a sufficiently large buyer of a commodity to remunerate the costs of collusion [Stigler (1968, p. 45)].

Local government debt in China is increasing and presents a great threat to China's financial stability. In China's fiscal system, the central government often prioritizes reducing its fiscal deficit and can determine to a great extent the distribution of revenue and expenditure between itself and local governments. There is therefore a tendency for the fiscal burden to be shifted from the central government to the local governments. Resolving China's local government debt problem requires not only strengthening regulation, but also abandoning the central government's fiscal balance target, because this target may make regulation hard to sustain in times of economic downturn. This paper discusses central-local fiscal relations in the framework of Modern Money Theory, suggesting that, because a government with currency sovereignty can always afford any spending denominated in its own currency, China's central government should bear a greater fiscal burden.

The U.S. Government has looked for effective ways of reducing acquisition cost and schedule overruns for decades. The task of isolating the root cause of these overruns has been difficult. Consequently, it has been difficult for the Government to create effective policies that prevent overruns from recurring. In 1998, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) undertook this problem, and looked to successful DOD and commercial companies for solutions. They found that using mature technology, having complete product designs, and having production processes under control was critical to successfully developing new products. The GAO combined these concepts into a single acquisition practice that they call a Knowledge-Based Approach. They postulate that programs that adhere to the Knowledge-Based Approach will experience better program outcomes than programs that do not. This thesis validates the GAO's claim by comparing the outcomes of programs that met the Knowledge-Based Approach criteria with those that did not. Our findings suggest that the GAO's claim is accurate. While their approach may not be a single means for success, programs that employed their approach generally performed better. The programs that met the GAO's criteria experienced a smaller variation of outcomes and appeared less likely to spiral out of control.

To alleviate project financial pressure and improve performance, the public-private partnership (PPP) arrangement was introduced by the central government of China to facilitate the sustainable development of infrastructure. However, arising government credit crisis from the PPP project may damage both the private's and public's interests, and affect the government performance of PPP projects consequently. In order to understand the influence between government credit and performance, we constructed a government credit evaluation index system by using the Wuli-Shili-Renli system theory, and conducted a questionnaire survey among people related to PPP based on 359 valid questionnaires. The results firstly indicated that government credit and performance of PPP projects are optimistic in China. Secondly, the institutional environment, financial situation, management technology and internal and external communication of government credit all have a positive impact on the government performance of PPP. Thirdly, the government credit and performance of PPP projects can be increased by the improvement of regional economic and social development. These findings enrich the knowledge system of the relationship between government credit and performance of PPP projects and contribute to clarifying the influence of government credit and performance, thus provide the basis for the government to guide PPP practice effectively.

AbstractMuch social entrepreneurship has occurred in countries with national governments with low levels of state capacity to address social problems. Yet, little or no social change resulting from social entrepreneurship could have become 'large‐scale' without the enabling institutions, resources, and policies of government, even ones with reputations for inefficiency or corruption. We develop a typology for describing the functions of government in social entrepreneurship in terms of the level of state capacity (i.e., higher or lower) and the locus of social innovation (i.e., top‐down or bottom‐up). We adopt the 'classical view' of entrepreneurship of Israel Kirzner and Joseph Schumpeter and extend it to social entrepreneurship in order to recognize entrepreneurial behaviour as a universal phenomenon in all institutional environments and to model and specify social entrepreneurship in social systems. We find preliminary evidence to support the typology in many well‐known, contemporary cases of social entrepreneurship.Resumen.En países con gobiernos nacionales en que el estado posee una baja capacidad para abordar los problemas sociales se ha observado la aparición de multitud de iniciativas sociales. A pesar de ello, pocos o ninguno de los cambios sociales con origen en iniciativas sociales podrían haber alcanzado una gran escala si no hubieran sido habilitados por las instituciones, recursos y políticas de sus gobiernos, incluso para aquellos presuntamente ineficaces o corruptos. Desarrollamos una tipología para describir las funciones del gobierno en iniciativas sociales en términos del nivel de la capacidad estatal (alto o bajo) y el origen y dirección de la innovación social (de arriba a abajo o desde abajo hacia arriba). Adoptamos el "concepto clásico" de espíritu emprendedor de Israel Kirzner y Joseph Schumpeter y lo trasladamos a las iniciativas sociales para entender así el comportamiento emprendedor como un fenómeno universal que surge bajo cualquier ambiente institucional y modelizar y especificar las iniciativas sociales dentro de los sistemas sociales. Encontramos indicios preliminares que apoyan la tipología en muchos casos contemporáneos de iniciativas sociales bien conocidas.

This paper presents the results of a field investigation into the implementation of President Clinton's "reinventing government' initiative: the National Performance Review (NPR). We examine the efforts of six federal agencies and identify some specific points of tension that have arisen during implementation. The paper concludes that the evident lack of any theoretical coherence to the reforms and the corresponding inability to "tell what's false" have contributed to the development of these points of tension and are likely to present continuing problems to managers attempting to resolve the multiple competing objectives included in the NPR recommendations.

The concept of organizational culture became prominent during the 1980s partly because of the international success of Japanese industry. Differences between Japanese and American approaches to developing efficient and productive organizations have been noted extensively in the management literature. While changing organizational culture is not an easy process, it can be accomplished by emphasizing a commitment to the individual employee. Despite the literature's heavy emphasis on the private sector, many of the elements of Theory Z can be found in public organizations. This article describes one city's effort to change culture by emphasizing fair treatment of organizational members, employee involvement, two-way communication, employees' personal development and recognition and camaraderie.

The question of why key academic economic arguments for the assignment of functions to decentralized government have not informed the political debate in Switzerland is examined in this paper. In the first section the most relevant theoretical factors of optimal government organization for service delivery are reviewed. A catalogue of criteria that have been debated in the Swiss context at both federal–cantonal and cantonal–local levels are covered in the second section. The main point is that the discussion is focused on rather different criteria from those noted in orthodox economic theory. The analysis of the causes and discrepancies between theory and practice permits a more general conclusion, addressed to fiscal federalism. The conclusion is that there is no general answer to how functions should be assigned to a particular level of government, as the solution depends upon the relevant value-judgments of the polity as well as the resources-use required to provide given services. The outcome is a set of proposals on how better procedures for the assignment of functions might be developed.