Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Performance through Network Analysis of Question Types in Public Procurement Law

Government procurement and SME innovation: Quasiexperimental evidence from China’s 2018 SME promotion law

From expansion to optimization: Government health expenditure and chronic disease burden among older adults in China.

Despite the well-recognized relationship between income and life expectancy, much of the existing evidence is indirect, relying on cross-country comparisons, statistical modeling, analyses beginning at older ages, or data limited to a small number of specific socioeconomic groups. To examine life expectancy at birth across the entire Spanish population using up to one hundred income groups and to analyze its variation by income level during the austerity period following the Great Recession. The study adopts a whole-population microdata ecological approach and employs five-year rolling death rate estimators to construct life tables by income group and sex in Spain from 2012 to 2017. The computations, which involve over 14 billion person-year observations, are based on a dataset comprising 520 million unique demographic events recorded over a ten-year period. Life expectancy at birth increases progressively with income percentile, with differences between the poorest and richest groups exceeding 8 years among men and 5 years among women. The gap between the highest- and lowest-income groups widened during the austerity period under study, indicating a growing disparity. These findings support the view that economic conditions are closely linked to mortality risk and underscore the importance of social policies. They also suggest that addressing income-related health disparities through targeted interventions and public healthcare spending may reduce inequalities across social groups and yield substantial gains in life expectancy.

Legal process mining for the analysis of public procurement workflows

Narrowing the pay gap: The role of government procurement

Existing evidence suggests that mortality remains disproportionately high across Africa, where gains in life expectancy continue to lag behind global progress. While health financing is central to health-system performance, its relationship with mortality in African settings remains insufficiently characterized, particularly when public spending, household out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, governance conditions, and demographic pressures are considered jointly. Our objective was to use a non-linear regression method to evaluate how health financing structures are associated with mortality and whether the association depends on the mode of financing. We use generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) to allow for potential non-linear relationships between crude mortality rates and public health expenditure, out-of-pocket payments, political stability, and age dependency across 51 African countries from 2002 to 2022 (N = 1,071 country-year observations). A tensor-product interaction assessed whether financial protection modifies the effect of public health spending. Region-specific models were fitted for Central, East, West, Southern, and Northern Africa. Public health spending was associated with lower mortality across Africa, with the steepest reductions below approximately US$80 per capita and diminishing returns thereafter. Out-of-pocket (OOP) spending modified these returns: OOP burdens below 15% of total health expenditure strengthened the estimated mortality benefit of public investment by about 60%, whereas burdens above 40% substantially eroded it. Regionally, the spending-mortality association was strongest in Central, Eastern, and Western Africa, but weaker in Southern and Northern Africa, where age dependency and governance quality were more prominent predictors. The expenditure-OOP interaction was most pronounced in Eastern Africa (EDF = 9.45, F = 4.45, p < 0.001). The continent-wide model showed strong explanatory performance (adjusted R2 = 92.8%; deviance explained = 93.4%; N = 1,009). Increasing public health spending alone is unlikely to maximize mortality gains in Africa. Its impact depends on financial protection: reducing household out-of-pocket costs through pooled financing should be accompanied by expanded public investment. In Southern and Northern Africa, policy emphasis should also shift toward governance efficiency and demographic pressures. Subregion-specific strategies are therefore essential.

As the chronic shortage of human donor organs becomes an undeniable clinical reality, xenotransplantation has transitioned from a theoretical concept to the threshold of clinical integration. Recent successful pig-to-human kidney trials signify a pivotal milestone, shifting the scientific focus from feasibility to long-term sustainability and systemic implementation. This review critically evaluates the current status and future trajectory of xenotransplantation, challenging the "more is better" paradox of genetic engineering. It emphasizes the minimum viable edit set and the physiological superiority of miniature pigs overgrowth hormone receptor knockout models. Furthermore, the paper outlines a Korean-style governance model, integrating advanced digital transformation and specialized infrastructure. Key proposed strategies include (1) digital monitoring: implementing a noninvasive surveillance system utilizing donor-derived cell-free DNA, digital twins, and AI-driven early warning systems; (2) blockchain integration: establishing data integrity and tokenomics-based patient compliance through a sovereign medical coin system to incentivize lifelong surveillance; (3) infrastructure innovation: introducing the Hybrid Hospital Model, featuring a sterile barrier window between porcine and human surgical suites to achieve a zero-ischemia workflow. Finally, the study stresses the necessity of a Xenotransplantation Special Act and the collaboration between public organ procurement organizations and specialized private contract research organizations. By combining genetic minimalism and a robust legal framework, South Korea can establish itself as a global standard setter, transforming xenotransplantation into a standardized, manageable precision medical service.

This article revisits the role of the state in a monetary production economy through the methodological contributions of Victoria Chick. The climate transition intensifies this debate by raising new questions about how public expenditure should be evaluated and coordinated over time. Keynes identified structural features of market economies—particularly uncertainty and coordination failures—that justify proactive state intervention not merely to correct market imperfections but to guide investment and economic development. His proposal to distinguish between current and capital expenditure within the fiscal budget was one attempt to capture the long-term effects of public spending. Yet contemporary fiscal frameworks still classify expenditures primarily according to their transactional form. Building on Chick’s open-system methodology, the paper introduces the concept of productive transfers as an analytical category for fiscal expenditures recorded as current transfers that nevertheless mobilize investment and expand productive capacity. Reinterpreting such expenditures functionally helps reveal economic effects often obscured within conventional accounting classifications.

This study analyzes the determinants of economic growth in Angola, with a particular focus on the composition of public spending and its interaction with key macroeconomic variables. Methodologically, the research uses a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model as the main empirical strategy, allowing the capture of dynamic interdependencies between Gross Domestic Product (GDP), different types of public spending, the exchange rate, the price of oil, and tax revenue. The variables were transformed into natural logarithms and tested for stationarity using the augmented Dickey-Fuller test and subsequently differentiated to ensure adequate time series properties. The results reveal that the effects of public spending on economic growth vary significantly depending on its composition. Public investment has the most robust positive impact, while spending on wages and pensions has moderate effects, and spending on goods and services demonstrates lower economic efficiency. Additionally, the price of oil emerges as a determining variable, reinforcing the external vulnerability of the Angolan economy. The results suggest that the sustainability of economic growth depends not only on the volume of public spending, but above all on its composition, making it crucial to prioritize spending with a greater multiplier effect

While public health expenditure is widely assumed to reduce health inequalities, empirical evidence from low- and middle-income countries remains limited. This study examines whether increases in public health spending in Indonesia between 2010 and 2017 reduced inequalities in under-five mortality (U5MR). We combined two approaches to assess distributional effects of health spending. First, we used a dynamic panel System-GMM model to estimate the impact of public health expenditure on within-province inequality in U5MR, measured by the concentration index across household wealth quintiles. Second, we applied instrumental variable quantile regression to identify heterogeneous treatment effects across provinces with different baseline mortality burdens. In addition, we estimated the average effect of public health expenditure on U5MR levels and found no statistically significant impact. The results show that higher public health spending increased inequality in U5MR across socioeconomic groups, with wealthier households capturing a disproportionate share of the mortality reductions. By contrast, we find no statistically significant heterogeneity in the impact of spending between high- and low-mortality provinces. These results suggest that increases in spending were not well-targeted to disadvantaged groups or high-mortality regions. Our findings demonstrate that raising overall levels of public spending is not sufficient to reduce health inequalities unless resources are explicitly directed toward disadvantaged groups and underserved areas. This study provides a proof of concept for applying distribution-sensitive methods to assess the equity impact of health financing, offering lessons that remain highly relevant for Indonesia's post-JKN reforms and contributing to global debates on equity-weighted evaluation, benefit incidence, and the distributional consequences of health spending in LMICs.

ObjectivesTo map and synthesise evidence on interventions and preparedness strategies addressing climate-related occupational health risks among migrant workers and to identify gaps across five domains: formal health sector; health surveillance systems; regulations or policies; corporate and public procurement and worker, employer, non-governmental organisation (NGO) and academic strategies.DesignScoping review conducted in accordance with the Arksey and O’Malley framework and reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) extension for Scoping Reviews.Data sourcesOvid MEDLINE and Ovid Global Health, searched for peer-reviewed studies published from 1 January 2000 to 28 March 2025, in any language. Expert consultations were used to identify five intervention domains and to supplement database searches.Eligibility criteriaPeer-reviewed studies reporting on interventions or preparedness strategies at the intersection of climate change, occupational health and migrant worker populations. Studies of any design were eligible. Studies focusing solely on internal migrants or addressing general climate-related health risks without explicit reference to occupational health or migrant workers were excluded.Data extraction and synthesisTitle, abstract and full-text screening was conducted independently by at least two reviewers, with discrepancies resolved through discussion. Data were charted using a standardised extraction sheet and analysed descriptively and thematically.Results19 studies met the inclusion criteria. Most (15) were from the USA; four were from Egypt, Guatemala, UAE and Kuwait. Studies focused primarily on agriculture. Interventions were found for the formal health sector (n=3); regulations or policies (n=4) and workers, employers, NGOs and academics (n=12). We found a critical lack of health sector preparedness to address rising climate-related migration and worker morbidity. Despite the protection potential of policies, regulations and cross-border agreements, only four studies evaluating these approaches were identified. No intervention studies were found for corporate and public procurement or health surveillance. This likely reflects broader gaps in data systems, which rarely collect or disaggregate climate-related health outcomes for migrant workers, especially in low- and middle-income countries.ConclusionsHealth systems remain critically underprepared to detect, foresee and respond to climate-related illness among migrant workers. Migrant-inclusive public health requires surveillance systems that capture this population, stronger protections against exploitative labour conditions that exacerbate climate vulnerability, and demand-side accountability from corporate and procurement actors. Applying just transition principles will promote workers’ participation in decisions shaping their own health, rights and livelihoods.

ABSTRACT This study examines whether populist governance shaped public procurement corruption risks during COVID-19 across 23 EU Member States. Despite common emergency rules, corruption risks varied markedly. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and the Corruption Risk Index, the study finds that populist governance combined with poor integrity norms is sufficient to explain high corruption risk increases. Populist-led governments intensify risks by undermining oversight, exploiting legal loopholes, and legitimizing rule-breaking through anti-elite narratives, particularly where accountability cultures are weak. Anti-corruption strategies must therefore account for crisis conditions and politicized governance, ensuring independent oversight mechanisms remain intact under populist rule.

ABSTRACT This study investigates how public policy capacity, institutional trust, and socio-demographic characteristics shape multiple dimensions of life satisfaction in the United States. Employing Hierarchical Linear Regression models, this study examines the effects of government policy instruments, including job-saving measures, reduction in length of work week, unemployment-related expenditures alongside trust in financial, economic, and public institutions, on happiness, work satisfaction, and financial satisfaction. The findings indicate that public spending on unemployment benefits, trust in business institutions, and trust in the federal government are positively associated with happiness. Work satisfaction is significantly influenced by employment protection policies, unemployment benefit expenditures, and trust in both business institutions and the federal government. Financial satisfaction is primarily determined by trust in financial institutions and federal governance capacity. Although socio-demographic characteristics display differentiated effects across life satisfaction domains, employment status and perceived social class consistently exhibit strong and positive associations with happiness, work satisfaction, and financial satisfaction.

This article proposes an objective model for evaluating the performance of public works based on cost and time deviations. In light of recurring challenges related to budget overruns and delays, particularly in public contracts, the study identifies the absence of standardized assessment models as a significant barrier to accountability and efficiency. Drawing on international benchmarking systems and consolidated theoretical frameworks, the authors propose a classification methodology based on three indicators: Cost Seal, Time Seal, and Work Seal. These indicators convert raw data into scalar scores and conceptual seals (ranging from A to F), enabling cross-sectional analyses and supporting evidence-based governance. The model incorporates both direct and indirect costs, conducts time-based analysis regardless of suspensions or extensions, and introduces transparent metrics for comparative diagnostics. It is a methodological framework whose primary contribution lies in the structured development of a classification architecture for public works performance assessment. The model is conceptually validated using a simulated dataset to demonstrate its internal coherence and operational feasibility under controlled conditions. Empirical calibration using real-world datasets is identified as a subsequent research stage, contingent upon improvements in data standardization and availability. The proposal contributes to public governance by establishing a transparent, replicable and standardized evaluation structure capable of supporting systematic monitoring and comparative analysis.

This study investigates the relationship between life expectancy among older adults and key fiscal variables such as state development expenditure, central development expenditure, and pension expenditure, using an auto-regressive distributed lag model. The analysis explores both short- and long-run dynamics over an extended period. Results show that state and central development expenditures have a significant positive impact on the life expectancy of men aged 60 and above. However, lagged central development expenditure exerts a negative and statistically significant effect on the life expectancy of older adult women, suggesting potential gender disparities in the benefits of public spending. Bounds testing confirms a stable long-run association between the fiscal variables and life expectancy among older adults. The findings underscore the importance of inclusive and gender-sensitive development policies to enhance the quality of life for older adults in India, offering valuable insights for fiscal planning.

ABSTRACT Residential care is a key component of child welfare systems, particularly for adolescents with complex support needs. Trauma-informed care (TIC) emphasizes safety, predictability, and supportive relationships by recognizing the pervasive impact of trauma on development. While previous research has examined TIC extensively at the program level, less is known about how trauma-informed elements are represented in residential care service descriptions used in public procurement processes. This study examined how trauma-informed elements are represented in Finnish residential care service descriptions and how these elements relate to one another. A qualitative content analysis of documents, complemented by a co-occurrence analysis, was conducted on 84 anonymized residential care service descriptions. Following an abductive approach, the codes were refined into three trauma-informed elements: dyadic, systemic, and integrated. Trauma-informed dyadic elements, particularly key-worker meetings, were most frequently described. Systemic elements such as structured routines, youth and parent participation, and multi-professional collaboration were also widely described. However, explicit integration of these elements was rare. While dyadic and systemic structures supporting safety and participation were described, limited integration across elements suggests a need for more coherent and context-sensitive TIC models that bridge relational and organizational practices. These findings may also inform international discussions on how trauma-informed care can be operationalized and integrated within residential care systems.

In political systems, fiscal policy has a big influence. In order to maintain financial system stability, promote economic growth, and avert unanticipated crises in the various economic sectors, fiscal policy may become more crucial during a downturn. Fiscal policy is seen to be able to keep the economy stable throughout recessions, declines in demand, wage declines, employment contractions, and economic shocks. In view of this, this study attempted an analysis of fiscal policy and the unemployment rate in the Sultanate of Oman. As a result, a qualitative research approach was used in the study. Government records and interviews were used to gather data. After the tenth interview, saturation was reached in the theme analysis of the acquired data. Three main themes emerged from the findings: (1) the conflict between employment and fiscal policy; (2) structural obstacles to successful policies; and (3) strategic fiscal policies for long-term job development. In particular, the results demonstrated the paradoxical relationship between public spending and job creation, with statistics consistently confirming the contribution of infrastructure investment to job creation while also acknowledging that austerity and tax policies, such as VAT, have restricted private sector growth.

ABSTRACT This study examines how political turnover influences government procurement decisions, highlighting the critical role of national institutional frameworks in shaping procurement practices. Drawing on data from 2015 to 2022, we find that political turnover significantly increases non-green public procurement while reducing green public procurement. Mechanism analyses reveal that these effects are driven by heightened officials’ promotion pressure and shifts in officials’ sentiment. Our findings remain robust under endogeneity and robustness checks. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate that the positive effect on non-green procurement is more pronounced within state-owned enterprises, in the eastern region, for local officials, and within heavy-polluting and capital-intensive industries. Conversely, the negative impact on green public procurement is more significant within SOEs, in the mid-western region, for non-local officials, and in the same industrial sectors. These results underscore the importance of political turnover in influencing public procurement decisions.

Purpose Public procurement is increasingly recognised as a tool for governing and shaping supply markets. Yet we still know little about how local authorities engage in market shaping through contracting practices, especially in newly decentralized markets. This study investigates the role of awareness, motivation and capabilities (AMC) in how municipalities influence (or fail to influence) social care markets, and how these dynamics manifest in contracting practice. Design/methodology/approach We combine secondary data with semi-structured interviews conducted with procurement professionals across municipalities, regional consortia, and expert organizations. The case context is Dutch social services procurement, which transitioned to a decentralised market in 2015. The AMC framework is used to classify buyer archetypes and explain variation in market-shaping behaviour across municipalities. Findings Municipalities shape social care markets, although not always intentionally. We identify four buyer archetypes (Disengaged, Aspiring, Short-sighted, Strategic Steward). We further introduce a fifth archetype, the Market Drifter, capturing municipalities that shift contracting approaches reactively. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature on strategic procurement and market governance by showing how local authorities influence markets along a spectrum from unconscious to deliberate shaping. Applying AMC highlights gaps in awareness, motivation and capability and points to activities (e.g. collaboration, capacity building) that can address these weaknesses. The findings offer both theoretical value, linking procurement to market-shaping debates, and practical guidance by stressing contextual fit rather than a one-size-fits-all path to strategic stewardship.