Budgeting Decisions Research Articles

The financing of innovation policies in Brazil between 1999 and 2016: political economy, institutions and financial cycles

ABSTRACT The main objective of the present paper is to provide the reasons behind the rise and fall of resources for innovation policies in Brazil between 1999 and 2016. The paper also intends to provide a broad map of the financial relations between funding sources and financial agents in the Brazilian National System of Innovation (NSI). In order to do that, the paper uses mixed methods: a historical approach to cover the motivations of the political economy; principles of network analyses to map the institutional relations between funding sources and financial agents; and economic theory to understand the determinants of the cash flows that finance science, technology and innovation (STI) policies. The institutional arrangement of the Brazilian NSI led the financial cycle to rely, on a general level, on GDP dynamism; the strategy of selected public bodies; on the federal budget decision process; and on the external economic cycle. Between 2003 and 2014, political struggles led to economic policies that favoured GDP growth and public spending, while the opposite occurred from 2015 onwards. In general, institutions were not equipped to protect the financial resources from the political changes of the mid-2010s.

A Human Rights-Based Approach To Acute Mental Health Crisis Care

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as well as the new guidance on community mental health services recently published by the World Health Organization formulate clear goals for the future of psychiatry and psychosocial support. Innovative concepts of psychiatric care that focus on full participation, recovery-orientation and the prevention of coercion play an important role in achieving these goals. Implementing and scientifically evaluating the effects of such models in mental health services needs to be prioritized in national mental health planning and budgeting decisions. In this lecture, Dr. Lieselotte Mahler will address the requirements of psychiatric concepts, specifically on acute psychiatric wards, to enable participation and prevent coercion. Using practical examples and evaluated models (e.g. Weddinger Modell, standardized post-coercion review sessions), she will make suggestions on how a psychiatry oriented towards human rights can also be implemented within existing clinical structures. Dr. Lieselotte Mahler will discuss, based on the current state of research as well as practical experience, which challenges exist with regard to patient autonomy and prevention of coercion in clinical practice and how these can be addressed from a human rights perspective.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Strengthening internal accountability by avoiding fantasy documents in responsibility center budgeting

AbstractHigher education scholars often investigate the policy mechanisms of external accountability, but rarely explore institutional mechanisms of internal accountability. This chapter, which reports select findings from an in‐depth case study of institutional budgeting at an American public research university, examines an underexplored mechanism of internal accountability – annual budget reviews. The findings illustrate that the university's budget review often constitutes a fantasy practice that affirms the institution's commitment to fiscal prudence as much as scrutinizes budgetary decisions in academic units. The findings reveal opportunities to strengthen budget reviews at institutions that have adopted decentralized budget models such as Responsibility Center Budgeting.

Design of a Big-data-Based Decision Support System for Rational Cultural Policy Establishment

This paper proposes a technique for designing a decision-making system based on big data to support rational cultural policy decisions. To identify a rational cultural policy, it is necessary to extract a comparable index for cultural policy and analyze and process factors in terms of cultural supply and cultural consumption. Analyzed and processed supply indices and consumption indices become the basic input data for calculating additional cultural indices that can be measured at the cultural level of each region. Regional cultural indices are treated as independent variables in terms of cultural supply, and target variables are considered in terms of cultural demand. Two corresponding types of regression models are established. Based on the eXtreme gradient boosting and light gradient boosting machine algorithms, which are representative algorithms for calculating cultural indicators, we attempted to construct and analyze a model of the proposed system. The developed model is designed to predict the demand index according to the regional cultural supply index. It was confirmed that the demand side could be changed based on supply-side items by using the proposed technique to support decision-making. Due to the complexity of the policy environment of modern society, mixing various policy tools targeting multiple functions is accepted as a common basis for policy design, but institutional arrangements are needed to reflect the results of various data analyses in budget decision-making. This will be possible to produce data based on effectiveness and suggest appropriate rational policies and decisions.

A MCDA-based Approach on Corporate’s Investment Decision Process: A case study of a Small-sized Firm’s decision on Foreign Direct Investment

Small and medium-sized enterprises have frequently been facing great troubles in capital budgeting and investment decisions. Part of these troubles comes from the very nature of the modern financial decision problems. While well-known classic optimization methods can properly solve traditional financial decision problems with a single objective, they fail at solving real-world complex problems, which involves the interplay of multiple concurrent decision factors, against a backdrop of financial constraints. As a result, the corporate finance field has been demanding more sophisticated approaches, which integrate traditional quantitative methods with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis techniques (MCDA), probabilistic models, simulations and optimization methods. This paper combines Corporate Finance theory with a MCDA approach based on the von Neumann-Morgenstern’s Utility Theory and presents a case study within a small-sized firm that needs to decide whether or not to expand into international operations, given a set of decision factors and financing constraints. The results deliver a structured decision framework to assist the firm’s managers, increasing impartiality in the investment decision process and help the decision makers (DM) reach a rightful, well-substantiated decision to their investment decision problem.

A Brief on Estimating Costs of Intangible Assets During Capital Budgeting Decisions

By examining financial reporting methods to determine the effects of a pandemic, intellectual property rights and other intangible assets. The goal is to explain how these factors are related to capital budgeting decision utilizing a very common and useful model for capital budgeting.

Precarization or Protection? The Role of Trade and Labour Policies on Informality

Several episodes of market-oriented reforms in developing countries have been accompanied by a significant rise in work outside of the formal economy. This paper investigates whether the impact of trade on formal employment is mediated by the strength of labour regulations. We rely on data from the Brazilian Census that provides information on workers' demographics and employment, including job formality status. Our estimation strategy exploits quasi-exogenous changes in industry-level real exchange rates to explore the likelihood of informality across employers exposed to varying degrees of de facto labour regulations. We further utilize two key features of Brazilian labour institutions – budgetary decisions about the availability of resources occur at the federal level, while decisions about where to inspect occur at the local level – to instrument for labour enforcement. Our results suggest that strict labour regulations may lead to a precarization of employment, rather than offering protection for workers.

Impact of social norms and joint influences of social connection and self‐sufficiency motivations on prosocial budgeting

AbstractThe current research reports results of seven studies that reveal how social norms information about people's spending on others makes one notice one's imbalanced (or lower) spending on others and feel unhappy about it. This motivates the consumer to undertake the corrective action of budgeting to spend more on others which then enhances happiness with her/his budgeting decision. These effects are stronger for time than for money and the mechanism underlying the corrective action is through the joint influences of social connection and self‐sufficiency motivations. Increasing saliency of the opportunity cost of time creates a boundary condition for the above effects and power in relationships moderates the imbalanced spending of time (vs. money) effect. These findings contribute to the literatures of social norms and time versus money by suggesting that social comparison can also influence prosocial budgeting to spend time and money on others. Managerially, peer‐to‐peer payment fintech companies, which have data about prosocial spending, can partner with restaurants and food delivery companies and with charitable institutions, to target messages to the customers of fintech companies urging them to use coupons to eat out with friends and to contribute to charitable causes.

Understanding Public Participation as a Mechanism Affecting Government Fiscal Outcomes: Theory and Evidence From Participatory Budgeting

AbstractThis study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased transparency of the local budget and (2) improved budget literacy of citizens. This study investigates a link between participatory budgeting and the fiscal outcomes of local governments by utilizing data drawn from Korean local governments for seven fiscal years. Employing instrumental variable regression to address endogeneity, there is strong evidence that public participation and deliberation during the participatory budgeting process have a positive association with the fiscal balance. There is also weak evidence that the authority delegated to participatory budgeting participants affects the fiscal balance. The findings of this study imply that it is the quality of public participation that matters in holding the government accountable for its fiscal decisions.

Statistics: An Intrinsic Part of Everyday Life

Fast becoming an ever-present reality in our day-to-day lives, statistics play an intrinsic and contemporary role in our everyday activities, especially, in today’s data-driven world. Owning to its definition as the science of collecting, summarizing, presenting and interpreting information, statistics helps us understand the world a little bit better through numbers as well as other quantitative and qualitative source of information. Although statistics originated many centuries ago, its impacts and applications have evolved in recent years as modern statisticians have advanced applications of statistics through innovative, problem-solving approaches, far beyond its historic use by governmental offices to capture censuses in order to track population sizes and growths (Michigan Technological University, 2021). One of these modern statisticians was Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890 - 1962) who was active as a mathematician, statistician and geneticist. Although trained as an (evolutionary) biologist, Fisher was referred to as the “father of the modern science of statistics” as he single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science (Anders, 1998). He further pioneered the design of experiments principles, small samples statistics and the analysis of real data. He went on to published a book titled “Statistical Methods for Research Workers” in 1925, which later became one of the 20th century's most influential books on statistical methods and even to date. His notable works includes the popularly used F-test, F-distribution, Fisher’s exact test, maximum likelihood estimation, random effects models and analysis of variance, to mention a few. The importance of statistics being relevant to nearly every area of our lives cannot be overemphasized enough, to the extent that all countries over the world have at least one national statistical agency operating within their respective countries that manages critical information related to labour trends, health, education, political campaigns and many more. Statistics has influenced and is still influencing the operations of industries such as the sales and financial markets, profit and non-profit organizations, meteorological services, medical care services, manufacturing, urban planning, education, law, and even social media analytics (to mention a few). In this present world, we as individuals and organizations regularly use statistics to make daily financial and non-financial planning and budgeting decisions that affects our lives. For example, consider the daily forecasted weathers, lending risks at banks, impacts of economy crises, healthcare financial policies, traffic flow operations, investment payoffs, urban planning with respect to population growths and declines, predicting diseases, stock markets, human psychology behaviours, insurance pay-outs, and political election results. All these, and more, are statistics and/or derived from statistics. Another simple life application of statistics is the global daily recorded number of COVID-19 cases, deaths, recoveries and vaccination numbers. As of 23 August 2021, a total of 212,679,403 COVID-19 cases were recorded, with 4,446,610 deaths and 190,301,359 recoveries, with majority of these cases reported in the United States of America, India, Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Russia, Turkey and Italy (Worldometer, 2021). Again, all these basic figures were all compiled through the use of statistics in various regions, states, countries, provinces and continents all over the world. Thus, statistics is heavily used in many different fields for a variety of applications as showcased in this journal issue.

Teachers’ Instructional Competences as Influenced by School-Based Management Practices of School Heads

The administrator plays a complex role in an organization, and each role has its corresponding responsibilities. This study aimed to determine the influence of school- based management practices on school heads to the level of teachers’ instructional competencies. The study used the descriptive-correlation research design to describe the level of school-based management practices of school heads and their influence on the teachers’ instructional competencies. Based on the findings, the five dimensions of SBM, such as school leadership, stakeholder participation, school improvement process, school-based resources, and school performance accountability, were Highly Observed among school heads in Kiamba District, Province of Sarangani. Moreover, teachers Often manifest instructional competence relative to their instructional skills, motivational skills, methods/strategies utilization skills, and evaluation utilization skills.
 
 
 Regression results show that teachers; instructional competence is Significantly related to the school heads’ performance accountability. The Regional Office, particularly the Division Office, should enhance SBM practices specifically on school leadership, stakeholders’ participation, school improvement process, and school-based resources by providing principals and teachers with professional development such as leadership training on effective SBM practices; upgrading the knowledge and increase the authority of school committee members on effective SBM practices; involve parents and other local people in the affairs of the school such as putting up school-based management projects and broaden school autonomy specifically on school’s operational, budgetary, programmatic, and instructional decisions.

Translating research into policy and action.

Translating research into policy and action.

The impact of the financial characteristics of companies on the capital budget an analytical study of the industrial and agricultural sectors in Iraq

The aim of the research is to measure and analyze the impact of the financial characteristics of companies represented by the prevailing patterns for each of (Current assets, Equity, Profits growth, Short liabilities, and current activities revenues) on the Capital budget of a sample of companies from both the industrial and agricultural sectors listed in the Iraq Stock Exchange for the period from (2010-2020), based on the research problem that was formulated by the following question: What are the most important financial characteristics that affect making and making investment decision for the research sample companies? From which emerged the research hypothesis, which states that Capital budget decisions of all kinds are affected by many indicators within its financial environment and vary in direction and strength and according to the type of variable, through the analysis of panel data for explanatory variables based on the Eviews 10 statistical program. And inverse to all explanatory variables in the Capital budget for both sectors with the exception of profit growth in the industrial sector, which appeared with an insignificant effect, and the research reached a set of recommendations perhaps the most important of which is that industrial companies withhold part or their profits for the purpose of directing them towards capital investment and relying on internal financing for the two sectors during the research period.

Citizen Participation and Budget Variance: How Does Local Government Make Better Fiscal Accountability?

We explore how citizen budget participation influences the difference between the original and final versions of local government budgets. Our findings based on 1,506 city and county governments in the U.S. show that localities with a higher level of citizen participation tend to increase any budget gap between original and final expenditures but decrease the gap on the revenue side of the budget. Citizens appear to be reluctant to modify revenues due to the lack of flexibility in allocating the tax burden. Alternatively, citizens may have more willingness to exploit the uncertainty of how expanded services will ultimately be funded over time. Our analysis provides insights into how public participation mechanisms influence the fiscal accountability of the presiding government budget decision makers.

Capital budgeting and managerial empire building

I examine how a company's headquarters use an empire-building manager's report about decision-relevant private information to make capital budgeting decisions and compensate the manager. To this end, I construct a model comprising the headquarters (principal) and the manager (agent), who reports on the investment project's expected profitability. I identify the optimal investment sizes and compensation payments, where the headquarters trade off managerial information rents – arising from empire-building benefits inducing the manager to favour overinvestment – for investment efficiency. The headquarters counteract the manager's desire for overinvestment with investment distortions in the form of underinvestment (or overinvestment) for a high (or low) expected profitability. Due to these distortions, the expected compensation is not monotone in the level of empire-building benefits. Unlike previous capital budgeting studies, in this study, I show that managerial empire-building benefits can multi-directionally affect companies' optimal capital budgeting decisions and related compensation schemes.

Inclusion of environmentally themed search terms improves Elastic net regression nowcasts of regional Lyme disease rates.

Lyme disease is the most widely reported vector-borne disease in the United States. 95% of confirmed human cases are reported in the Northeast and upper Midwest (25,778 total confirmed cases from Northeast and upper Midwest / 27,203 total US confirmed cases). Human cases typically occur in the spring and summer months when an infected nymph Ixodid tick takes a blood meal. Current federal surveillance strategies report data on an annual basis, leading to nearly a year lag in national data reporting. These lags in reporting make it difficult for public health agencies to assess and plan for the current burden of Lyme disease. Implementation of a nowcasting model, using historical data to predict current trends, provides a means for public health agencies to evaluate current Lyme disease burden and make timely priority-based budgeting decisions. The objective of the study was to develop and compare the performance of nowcasting models using free data from Google Trends and Centers of Disease Control and Prevention surveillance reports. We developed two sets of elastic net models for five regions of the United States: 1. Using only monthly proportional hit data from the 21 disease symptoms and tick related terms, and 2. Using monthly proportional hit data from terms identified via Google correlate and the disease symptom and vector terms. Elastic net models using the full-term list were highly accurate (Root Mean Square Error: 0.74, Mean Absolute Error: 0.52, R2: 0.97) for four of the five regions of the United States and improved accuracy 1.33-fold while reducing error 0.5-fold compared to predictions from models using disease symptom and vector terms alone. Many of the terms included and found to be important for model performance were environmentally related. These models can be implemented to help local and state public health agencies accurately monitor Lyme disease burden during times of reporting lag from federal public health reporting agencies.

Rebuilding Solidarity Through Advocacy Leadership: Principals Building Coalitions to Fight Exclusion and Displacement in Gentrifying Communities

Background School leader decision making can be complicated by the enrollment of affluent, and often white families in educational spaces that have served low-income, Black, and Brown families post-Brown. Principals’ behaviors influence whose power is coalesced and wielded to make school-wide curricular, budgetary, and personnel decisions. Methods This collaborative study used interviews as the primary method to capture two elementary, two middle, and two high school principals’ attempts to build coalitions with low-income families of color in their schools. Data was drawn from two separate studies analyzing school gentrification in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Using micropolitical theories and drawing on studies promoting a more community-centric approach to school leadership, the data was coded and organized into broad themes. These themes relate to coalition-building’s power in resisting the exclusion and marginalization of families most impacted by inequity in gentrifying schools and their neighborhoods. Findings Findings reveal that principals implemented strategies ranging from engaging in deliberate partnerships with Black and Brown families, implementing anti-racist curricula, and other means of centering Black and Brown communities. Implications Although principals can buffer long-standing families from gentrification’s deleterious consequences, there is a need for principals to unite with families and other school principals for a broader and more targeted and formalized dissent and policy strategy to ensure low-income Black and Brown families drive decision-making in schools and their districts.

Veterinary Clinical Education Delivery Models: A Conceptual Framework.

The sustainability of the traditional university-owned and -operated veterinary teaching hospital has been discussed for many years. Concerns around the shortage and lack of diversity of clinical faculty, financial sustainability, and suitability of secondary and tertiary case load for the development of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine students' Day One Competences are perennial issues. Consequently, many schools have been looking at alternative ways of delivering veterinary clinical education. This article provides a conceptual framework for evaluating the delivery of veterinary clinical education, providing putative advantages and disadvantages of each model for further empirical investigation. Four different models are proposed-owner, third party, embedded distributive, and fully distributive-that can broadly be defined along two dimensions: the degree of integration of the clinical enterprise with the academic enterprise and the degree of authority of the dean/head of school with respect to clinical enterprise governance and their role in budgetary, investment, and hiring decisions. The author offers a typology that may assist deans/heads of schools make strategic decisions about the mode of delivery of veterinary clinical education for their school.

The influence of a Pandemic on Decision Making

A Discussion of Capital budgeting models will be discussed in this manuscript to bring forth the notion that present value of cash flows is often improperly estimated. Financial models utilized in the decision analytic process. In particular, intellectual property rights and other intangible assets often are often not considered in accounting estimation processes utilized in financial accounting (Jarrett, 2021). A decision maker often utilizes misestimates of the present value of cash flow resulting in less-than-optimum capital budgeting decisions. Decisions to abandon for salvage, sale and other disposal methods improve when the present value of intangibles and property rights are included in the decision process. In particular, this last statement improves the estimation process in financial accounting, finance and abandonment and decision theoretic decisions in capital budgeting which are well-founded results in abandonment of property in both intellectual f this study as well as to present well-founded processes to improve abandonment in capital budgeting decisions involving cost estimation, matching of costs and revenues and equivalent problems in the recognition revenues with costs in financial decision processes.

Participatory budgeting and the party: Generating ‘citizens orderly participation’ through party-building in Shanghai

This article provides a qualitative examination of two cases of Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Shanghai – a long-running PB initiative in Minhang District, organised in cooperation with the District People’s Congress, and a one-off project in Yangjing Sub-district, Pudong, in 2017, jointly organised by a community foundation and residents’ committee. The article seeks to interrogate the relationship between the Party, state and society at the sub-municipal level through one ‘state-facing’ PB initiative and one ‘society-facing’ PB initiative. We reveal how PB is deeply embedded in Party structures and networks, formally in the case of Minhang and informally in the case of Yangjing. Our research contributes to three debates on participatory governance in urban China. Firstly, contrary to the existing literature, PB neither primarily ‘emancipates’ citizens nor off-loads budgetary decisions onto them; instead, PB contributes towards party-building and citizens’ orderly participation, thereby strengthening overall Party leadership. Secondly, we challenge the widely-used term ‘party-state’, instead separating out these three entities and showing how they serve distinct roles in grassroots governance innovations such as PB. Thirdly, we show how participatory mechanisms developed in one political and cultural context can have vastly differing effects when employed in another.