This paper explores the procurement of public buildings in local authorities in the UK under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and its consequences for small and medium sized enterprises. Following an outline of the development of PFI in the UK, the paper explains the peculiarities of local...

The article deals with efficiency networks, representing organizational structures created to solve problems in spheres of local government. It starts with the introduction to the efficiency networks concept as an instrument in overcoming challenges in municipality service delivery, including...

Whenever citizens want their elected officials to employ funds efficiently, they are in need of information in order to establish accountability. We develop an agency model with imperfect monitoring where newspapers provide voters with this information. The model predicts that an informed...

Local authorities spend considerable resources on social care at home for older adults. Given the expected growth in the population of older adults and budget cuts on local government, it is important to find efficient ways of maintaining and improving the quality of life of older adults. The...

Regional environment creates a set of factors that can be called either stimulants or barriers to the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Local governments should remove barriers, transforming them into promoters. An important feature that has to meet both the national...

Despite the extensive investigation regarding decentralization, the role of local governments in promoting firms’ internationalization doesn’t seem to have received adequate attention from literature, neither from the area of regional science nor from studies of international business. The...

In a context of transformation of local public action, public policy actors have a need for new information leading them to observe differently in order to reveal the "invisible". The inadequacy of existing statistics and the necessity of having a precise understanding of territorial dynamics...

Research has convincingly demonstrated that diversity of cultural backgrounds and associated differences in skills, education and abilities can be a rich resource for companies and creative teams but also for the social and economic development of societies. The challenge is to conceive and...

Despite extensive research on decentralisation, the role of local governments in promoting the internationalisation of firms has been rather neglected in the literature. Based on a sample of 144 Portuguese municipalities, and resorting to logistic econometric estimations, we found that: (1) the...