This thesis investigates the implementation of performance-based budgeting through a case-study of Indonesia. It examines the use by government officials/practitioners of performance information in the planning and budget-making process at the national level within Indonesia. In particular, the thesis assesses the impact that performance results have on budget allocations vis-a-vis other factors affecting budget allocation decisions. It also identifies the key challenges for government officials in seeking to implement a performance-based budgeting regime, especially, the challenge of moving the actual practice of budgetmaking model further away from a traditional incremental approach. The research for the thesis has involved a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, with three different data collection methods deployed. Interviews were conducted with fifty three government officials from the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Finance, seven other ministries/agencies and Parliament. A questionnaire was also designed and administered with seventy nine line ministry/agency officials. Finally, statistical analysis of performance scores and budget data was undertaken for 435 spending programmes covering 86 line ministries/agencies over the period 2011- 2014. A key conclusion from the study is that Indonesia has made significant efforts in the direction of using performance information in its budgetary planning processes. The Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Finance, and line ministries/agencies have been particularly active in leading change in this respect. That said, the evidence gathered from the interviews, questionnaire responses and statistical analysis clearly show that, as elsewhere around the world, the impact of performance information on resource allocation decisions has, so far, been quite limited, and that incrementalism continues to dominate budgetary decision-making. While performance information is becoming increasingly important for managerial purposes within line ministries/agencies, the more challenging goal of breaking well-established budget-setting practices and instituting a more performance-driven allocation model is largely still to be achieved.

In 2005, the South Korean government implemented a system of performance budgeting: Self-Assessment of Budgetary Programmes (SABP). Most studies on this system have focused on the relationship between SABP results and subsequent budget allocations. These studies are based on the premise that the SABP system itself is operating well, and consequently SABP results are reliable. However, this thesis questions that premise and analyses the process for arriving at SABP results, especially focusing on differences in views on the merit of programmes between the spending ministries and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance (MOSF), which controls SABP. The thesis addresses four key research questions: Which factors affect differences in views in the SABP process? What are the dysfunctional consequences of SABP? What is the impact of these dysfunctional consequences? And, lastly, what feasible policy alternatives can be proposed? The study suggests that there is a tendency to optimism bias by spending ministries in their self-assessment programmes, often leading to a subsequent drastic downward review of such assessments by the MOSF. These results are established by both quantitative and qualitative analysis. This thesis also provides evidence of dysfunctional effects arising from the SABP process, some of which are “unintended” by both spending ministries and the MOSF, while others are “unintended” by the designers of the SABP system but are likely to be “intended” by the spending ministries, as “agents” in the principal-agent relationship. The thesis concludes that both the unintended and intended dysfunctional consequences of SABP are sufficiently important to suggest that the performance budgeting system needs to be carefully re-designed, and proposals are made for feasible refinements to the SABP process.

The study seeks to clarify why donors such as the World Bank still insist on the use of their financial management system rather than the recipient country’s financial management system, despite the intention under the Paris Declaration 2005 to use the respective government’s systems. The study then explores the reasons why the financial management system used by the World Bank is more effective in managing risks related to public financial management and aid as compared to the Government of Malaysia approach. The study compares financial management by the World Bank and Ministry of Education, Government of Malaysia, in their parallel implementation of Educational Sector Support Projects (ESSP) under the Eighth Malaysian Plan, 2001-2005. The quality of financial management of projects in two systems is compared using established criteria of good financial management practice. Findings are based on evidence from interviews, documentation and direct observations. The study demonstrates the significant roles in reducing risks played in the World Bank approach by the Project Management Reports (PMR), the high quality of Project Implementation Unit (PIU) staff and the better procurement procedures. The implication is that more effective risk management and financial management reporting were needed by the Ministry of Education in implementing the ESSP under the Eighth Malaysian Plan 2001 - 2005.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s partnership has come to be the accepted mechanisms for the delivery of regeneration initiatives. The widespread evidence of partnership working across all spheres of government activity suggests that it now represents the new economic orthodoxy in the approach to co-ordination. During the same period there has been considerable attention drawn to the emergence of new forms of co-ordination based upon networking. The growth of partnership and networking has however proliferated in the absence of any systematic evaluation of their efficacy as an organisational form. Throughout this period a major objective of regeneration partnerships has been to alter the internal dynamics of partnership by broadening the range of participants involved. Partnership and network forms of working have thus become significant channels through which a range of actors have been incorporated into regeneration initiatives. In light of the growth of partnership and networking a major lacuna in our understanding arises from the absence of any theoretical framework which might describe the specific characteristics of these organisational forms of co-ordination. This thesis seeks to fill that vacuum by postulating a theoretical model of both partnership and network forms of co-ordination. The key attributes of the two models are identified, with common characteristics and key differentiating qualities discussed. This approach generated a set of analytical tools (a partnership checklist) designed in the first instance to be of practical use to the community and voluntary sectors as they engage in partnership but also to be of use to practitioners and participants generally. The checklist was tested on the Single Regeneration Budget partnership formed by the Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership, however, the insights developed have wider application for our understanding of partnership and networks in general.

This thesis addresses the problem of why a broad agreement on the importance of using public procurement to stimulate innovation (PPI) has not been realised in practice by analysing the adoption and implementation of associated processes by local authorities. It applies evolutionary and institutional perspectives underpinning the systems of innovation approach to reveal the contextual and organisational factors affecting the selection of procurement processes by local authorities. It contains evidence from two case studies in which organisations attempt PPI, comparative analysis of the procurement practices of three European city authorities, and analysis of the strategies and policy setting informing the current PPI paradigm. Data collection and analysis was guided by a framework describing how local authorities are likely to encounter PPI, derived from a review of the innovation and procurement literatures. The analysis re-frames the current PPI debates as translating practices defined in the exogenous institutional setting into legitimate and rationalised alternatives to established, path-dependent procurement routines. It extends our understanding of the framework conditions and processes of PPI and factors contributing to variation in incidence and form. It presents propositions, variables and indicators that could be tested in future studies, and considers implications for future research and policy-making.

This thesis seeks to examine contemporary factors that prevent an orderly resolution to a sovereign debt crisis. It comprises of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the research and highlights its main contributions. The second chapter narrates the background and motivation for the study. The third chapter studies a related paper on holdouts in sovereign debt restructuring and finds that, under a discrete time version with two creditors, asymmetric pure strategy Nash equilibria exists. This result, overlooked by the original paper, implies immediate agreement as the time between successive periods tends to zero. The fourth chapter investigates the impact of heterogeneous beliefs on delays in sovereign debt restructuring and finds that parties inefficiently delay settlement when their combined beliefs of court-outcomes are sufficiently heterogeneous. The chapter also explores other model expositions and establishes delay conditions. The fifth chapter studies the implied duty on the debtor to act in good faith in sovereign debt restructuring and is divided into two parts. The first part theoretically examines the efficiency and distributional impacts from enforcing a good faith duty on the debtor when bargaining with heterogeneous creditors. Here, good faith is defined as the non-violation of the court interpretation of the pari passu clause. The second part identifies judicial attempts made to enforce the good faith debtor duty to negotiate and proposes a doctrinal threshold that restricts judicial intervention to situations in which there is clear evidence of a failure, on the part of the debtor, to negotiate in good faith.

This thesis explores the argument that the need for governments to raise tax revenue, as opposed to relying on resource rents or other sources of non-tax revenue, may increase the likelihood that they will be responsive and accountable to their citizens. It employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, first testing the relationship between tax reliance and accountability econometrically using cross-country data and then turning to detailed case studies from Ghana, Kenya and Ethiopia. The econometric results conclude that while existing data is consistent with the argument that tax reliance contributes to greater responsiveness and accountability, it is not possible to establish causality due to a combination of data limitations and the complexity of the underlying causal processes. This ambiguous finding provides motivation for the detailed case studies that follow. The causal model developed here proposes that the need for governments to rely on taxation may strengthen taxpayer demands for responsiveness and accountability, owing to the possibility of tax resistance and the role of taxation as a catalyst for collective action. Consistent with this model, the case study chapters present detailed historical narratives that capture significant examples from each of the three countries in which the need for taxation has contributed significantly to the expansion of responsiveness and accountability. As importantly, the case study evidence provides a nuanced understanding of the nature of the connections between taxation, responsiveness and accountability, highlighting three distinct types of causal processes at work, as well as the most significant social, political and economic contextual factors that shape the potential for tax bargaining. These lessons point toward important policy implications for foreign aid and tax reform more broadly.

Technology acceptance, especially internet banking acceptance has become a vital issue in the business world today. A number of studies agree on the importance of customer adoption and full utilization of internet banking services as the key factors for banks to achieve the benefits from launching this channel (eg. Guriting & Ndubisi, 2006; Nor, 2005; Yousafzai, 2005; Mols et al., 1999). They also highlight the crucial role of the comprehensive understanding of the factors and their interactions with each other that influence customers in accepting and using internet banking services. A review of literature related to internet banking indicates that while there are numerous studies that have tried to identify the factors affecting non-adopters and/or users of internet banking there is no single study, specifically in Saudi Arabia, that sheds light on the factors affecting dormant users of internet banking. Hence, the present study provides additional insights into this issue. The study adds to the body of knowledge in the technology acceptance field by developing a comprehensive model for internet banking acceptance. The model extended the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to include additional components, namely task-technology fit (TTF), perceived trust and perceived risk. The subjects for this study were Saudi bank customers who are dormant users of internet banking services. One thousand copies of the questionnaire were distributed in five Saudi cities: Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Abhah and Buraydah. A total of 430 completed questionnaires were received, giving a response rate of 43% of the original sample. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was the statistical technique employed in this study. The main results of this study suggest that two factors, namely perceived usefulness and service visibility directly influence Saudi customers’ intention to use internet banking. Perceived ease of use is indirectly significant on the behavioral intentions through perceived usefulness. Moreover, perceived trust, system reliability and accessibility significantly influence perceived ease of use of internet banking. The results also reveal that customer trust in internet banking can be developed by focusing on only one theoretical construct of trust, perceived bank trustworthiness of the internet banking provider. Based on the findings, implications for internet banking practice and related future research have been identified.

The objective of this thesis was to identify statistical issues that are commonly associated with evaluations of services for older people with a view to establishing the most appropriate methods of addressing them. This goal was achieved in two stages. In the first stage, a comprehensive literature review of studies that have reported such evaluations on populations of older people in the UK was conducted. The second stage involved demonstrating approaches for dealing with these issues on a dataset drawn from largest evaluation of intermediate care done and published in the UK to date. The approaches were adapted from the studies reported in the literature review and where appropriate, from other sources. This thesis identified a number of statistical issues including those associated with distributional characteristics of variables, missing data and the need to predict utility outcome measures from non-utility ones. Robust approaches of dealing with these problems were demonstrated. The results obtained underlined the importance of avoiding erroneous results and conclusions by applying methods with a sound theoretical background.

This thesis focuses on the algorithm configuration problem. In particular, three efficient learning configurators are introduced to tune parameters offline. The first looks into metaoptimization, where the algorithm is expected to solve similar problem instances within varying computational budgets. Standard meta-optimization techniques have to be repeated whenever the available computational budget changes, as the parameters that work well for small budgets, may not be suitable for larger ones. The proposed Flexible Budget method can, in a single run, identify the best parameter setting for all possible computational budgets less than a specified maximum, without compromising solution quality. Hence, a lot of time is saved. This will be shown experimentally. The second regards Racing algorithms which often do not fully utilize the available computational budget to find the best parameter setting, as they may terminate whenever a single parameter remains in the race. The proposed Racing with reset can overcome this issue, and at the same time adapt Racing’s hyper-parameter α online. Experiments will show that such adaptation enables the algorithm to achieve significantly lower failure rates, compared to any fixed α set by the user. The third extends on Racing with reset by allowing it to utilize all the information gathered previously when it adapts α, it also permits Racing algorithms in general to intelligently allocate the budget in each iteration, as opposed to equally allocating it. All developed Racing algorithms are compared to two budget allocators from the Simulation Optimization literature, OCBA and CBA, and to equal allocation to demonstrate under which conditions each performs best in terms of minimizing the probability of incorrect selection.