Local State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) play an increasingly important role in the delivery of key public services to citizens across the world. Because they operate at arms' length from their parent organizations, arrangements for the effective governance of local SOEs are a major concern for public administration researchers and policy-makers alike. In many countries, local SOEs are supervised by boards of directors responsible for managing and monitoring service provision. Agency theory suggests that the size and composition of these boards is likely to be influenced by the ownership structure, organizational complexity, and growth opportunities. Using seemingly unrelated regressions to analyse the size and composition of local SOE boards in England, this study finds that large, minority public-owned, not-for-profit SOEs and those with more public sector partners have larger boards of directors, and that older, majority public-owned, and not-for-profit SOEs have more politicians on the board. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the governance, accountability and performance of local SOEs are discussed.

Existing studies see foreign donors as (a) brokers between sustainable development goals (SDGs) and aid-recipient countries' needs, or (b) intruders into aid-recipient countries' internal affairs. The intruder view has triggered regulations of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in aid-recipient countries. However, little is known, empirically, about how foreign donors respond to regulatory burden. We suggest regulatory burden adds uncertainty and turbulence to the operating context, negatively affecting government effectiveness in securing aid. This negative effect is moderated by the number of foreign donors operating in a jurisdiction. Propositions are tested in a data set derived from the 221 Ecuadorian municipalities during 2007-2018. Findings suggest regulations of NGOs have decreased municipalities' ability to secure international cooperation. This negative effect is larger in municipalities with a higher presence of donor supply. These results encourage policy makers to consider counterproductive costs of overregulating foreign NGOs and other civil society organizations when designing regulatory tools.

Despite the need for culturally-grounded public sector management practices, only a few studies have empirically investigated the compatibility between HRM practices and national culture. This study used fsQCA to investigate 'bundles' of HRM practices (recruitment, appraisal, and compensation) and Hofstede's original four dimensions of national culture as antecedent conditions for government effectiveness in 30 OECD countries. We found that performance-based appraisal, compensation and informal recruitment form a causal relationship with high individualism and low uncertainty avoidance for stronger government effectiveness. The results imply that local national culture is an important context for the transferability of public management practices.

Recent administrations in Korea have greatly emphasized the importance of decentralization and autonomous local governments. However, numerous efforts on decentralization have not been accompanied by adequate level of fiscal decentralization. Some critiques have long claimed that local governments are not equipped with enough financial independence or autonomy to deliver preferred services. Some others have challenged this claim, accusing local governments on potential waste of financial resources and local administration capacities, with no significant improvement in public service performance.
This research analyzes fiscal decentralization in terms of taxation and expenditure. It empirically investigates whether decentralized taxation and decentralized expenditure affect public service performance in Korean local governments. Based on an assortment of data on local government finance and public service performance, the analysis shows that decentralized taxation and decentralized expenditure have positive effects on a local government performance when either one of them was included in the model. In contrast, in the research model that included both variables, the effect of decentralized taxation on the government performance was not statistically significant. Meanwhile, the positive effect of decentralized expenditure was statistically significant. Results show that decentralized expenditure does not necessarily hinder local government performance, contrary to many concerns.
It is advised that administrations in Korea emphasize decentralized expenditure more than decentralized taxation. Decentralized expenditure does not hinder local government performance, and thus the government should continue to promote it to resolve imbalances across local governments.