The Economics of Nation-Building: Methodological Tool Kit and Policy Lessons

This instrumental case study compared the common themes of strategic intent from three strategic plans in agricultural education to current strategic thinking and beliefs of national leaders and policy makers. Eleven strategic intentions emerged from the strategic plans. Program and curriculum reform, as well as leadership and partnerships were mentioned the most in the strategic plans. There was a difference between the strategic plans and the national leaders regarding the need for programmatic, policy, and budgetary changes at the state and federal levels. The national leaders in agricultural education realized the importance of congressional visits, but questioned if their strategies were working. National leaders in education and agriculture stressed the need of agricultural literacy and awareness and funding opportunities within existing legislation. National policy makers stressed the need for more communications about agricultural education so that they are prepared when funding opportunities arise. The agricultural education profession should focus on policy changes and assess the effectiveness of implementing its strategic initiatives.

Integrating behavioural economics into climate-economy models: some policy lessons

Female employee labor turnover of information technology industry in Sri Lankan is in the higher level. Therefore, the general objective of the research is to assess the impact of major work life balance policies influence on retention of executive women employees in Information technology organizations in Sri Lanka. Five selected work-life policies namely flexible working hours, company leave policy, training and career development opportunities, compressed workweek and workload management were examined with employee retention. Base on random sampling method one hundred two completed questionnaires used to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics, correlation and multiple regression utilized to analysis the data. Work-life balance and employee retention levels are in the satisfactory level in the IT industry in Sri Lanka. Multiple regression result of the study shows that work-life balance policies positively influence on the executive women employee retention. Selected five policies of work-life balance and employee retention were examined using multiple regression model. Training and career development opportunities and workload management positive influence on employee retention. Although rest of three work life balance policies namely flexible working hours, company leave policy and compressed work week didn’t show the significant impact of employee retention. Policymakers and top management of companies should improve work-life balance to increase employee retention. Moreover, they can use training and career development opportunities and workload management to increase employee retention.

The inaugural National Leadership Education Research Agenda was created to establish a foundation for scholarship that will guide the field of Leadership Education and develop it as a discipline. Its timely research priorities present a framework for scholarship and resulting applied and basic implications. This paper provides perspective about the agenda’s conceptualization, development, and application. It establishes perspective for the applied nature of the agenda and transdiciplinary scholarship that can lead to powerful implications for the field of Leadership Education and the constituents it serves. Further, it explores the agenda’s priorities and how the resulting collaborative dialogue can advance the fields of Leadership and Leadership Education globally.

Professional learning in education policy should support school-based education leaders to engage critically with policy. Taking a broadly socially critical perspective on education leadership, we draw on theories of agentic leadership and Ball et al.’s (2011; 2012) typology of policy actors, including narrators, critics, and receivers to explore how leaders can reframe policy from a set of mandates into a flexible tool for equity and local responsiveness. Narratives from school-based senior and middle leaders who completed postgraduate policy courses reveal shifts in policy understanding and identity across four learning contexts: university, personal, work, and professional. While participants developed new perspectives and aspirations, their ability to enact policy was constrained by institutional hierarchies and cultures of compliance. The study highlights the need for professional learning that deepens policy knowledge and also supports leadership practice capable of reshaping policy engagement. It advocates for inclusive, collaborative, and contextually relevant approaches to policy work.

This chapter reconstructs the making and implementation of the new national curriculum in Finland (2012–2016). This research draws on non-affirmative theory of education and discursive institutionalism. The curriculum making process is perceived as a non-hierarchical educational leadership process where the National Board of Education (NBE) mediates and positions itself concerning (a) aims, (b) contents and (b) methods between transnational policies, national political decision making and policy work, various pressure and expert groups as well as school practice. The data consisted of interviews with three key actors within the Steering Committee of Curriculum Development (SCCD) and document analysis. The results demonstrate a shift towards stronger political steering, which in fact is a deviation from previous, trustbased policy regarding national education administration. In terms of discursive institutionalism the policy culture in Finland framing the curriculum leadership is still coordinative and dialogical, i.e. typical of a political consensus culture with broad governments, providing more autonomy for the educational administration. Second, curricular aims in the New Curriculum from 2016 reflect a movement towards a competence based curriculum, i.e. a more performative educational ideal is supported. The key competencies promoted are now similar to those promoted by the OECD since 2006. Third, a collaborative and development oriented professional culture around teaching methods is strengthened. Learning of the contents should now promote the development of more general key competencies. There are no indications of that the school system in Finland would be leaving a strong subject centered curriculum and evaluation.

Although prior studies explored the effectiveness of innovation policy in terms of firm’s collaboration and innovation output, few studies examined a nature of these effects. This paper addresses this gap by investigating policy effects on firm’s collaboration regarding a type of partnerships and innovation output in terms of a novelty. The empirical analyses from logistic regression and propensity score matching with the data from Korea Innovation Survey 2014 of manufacturing industries reveal that public support leads to increased collaboration and innovation output in overall. Moreover, a magnitude of effects is cumulative along with the extent of a policy scheme. However, the effect on innovation output seems to be only captured by a high degree of the support. These results implicate that a certain threshold level of intervention is needed to trigger innovation outcome. This paper contributes to the understanding of policy effectiveness regarding a nature of innovation activities.

The relationship between alcohol use, crime and public policy interventions is a pressing area of study in the policy sciences. This article compares the effects of alcohol price control policies and crime deterrence policies by type of crime through a case study of South Korea. Specifically, an instrumental variable was introduced to address the problem of endogeneity between alcohol consumption and crime. Instead of using the alcohol tax rate, this study’s instrumental variable was derived from the vertical restraint structure of the Korean distilled liquor industry. The results of the study’s empirical analysis show a significant and negative relationship between the arrest rate and violent, property, and economic crimes. Alcohol consumption is observed to have a positive relationship with violent crime only. Additionally, prevention activities deployed by the police were found to have a negative relationship with property crime, while the prosecution rate was determined to have a negative relationship with economic crime. Furthermore, as opposed to deterrence policies, an alcohol control policy through higher alcohol tax rates emerged as more effective for reducing alcohol-related crime, and a specific rate tax was found to be more effective than an ad valorem tax for deterring alcohol-related crime.

The digital transformation in the labor market has enabled individuals to work remotely from home, reshaping traditional employment structures. This study investigates the impact of remote work on the labor supply of married women in the regions of Sulawesi, Maluku, and Papua (SULAMPUA), utilizing data from the 2023 National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS). Employing advanced econometric techniques to correct for selection bias, we isolate the causal effect of remote work on weekly working hours. While initial observations suggest that working from home increases women’s labor supply, a rigorous causal analysis reveals the opposite finding that remote work actually reduces formal working hours by approximately 10–15 hours per week. This finding indicates that without adequate support systems, remote work arrangements tend to blur the boundaries between professional and domestic activities, causing women to substitute formal employment time with increased household responsibilities. For public administration and policymakers, this study highlights that digital infrastructure expansion alone is insufficient to close the gender gap. Effective digital employment policies require a foundation of gender-responsive services, specifically accessible childcare and social protection, to prevent remote work from reinforcing traditional domestic inequalities.

MotivationTurkey has been acknowledged as a “successful” example of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) reforms and has recently gained donor “darling status.” While the literature on UHC and health reforms in various countries has increased significantly in recent years, there is still little research on the political dynamics of the rise of UHC in national and global development agendas.PurposeThis study examines the politics of UHC in Turkey’s Health Transformation Program (HTP). It investigates how various policy actors, such as international organizations, policy experts and national political leaders, use UHC framing for different purposes.Approach & MethodsThe article develops an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that combines elements of ideational scholarship and critical policy analysis. The analysis is based on a review of the secondary literature and primary sources. Qualitative content analysis is used to identify major themes and analyse patterns of interactions across the various policy levels.FindingsThe article’s main findings demonstrate the ways in which international actors and national policy‐makers engage in policy work and use their relationships, global policy ideas and experiences to build legitimacy and support for their respective agendas. Reforms in Turkey were proposed and implemented before the rise of UHC in the global agenda, suggesting an ex post facto rebranding of its reforms as UHC. For Turkey’s policy‐makers, rebranding worked to tie their policy solutions, summarized in the HTP, to UHC as a widely accepted cultural symbol. The Ministry of Health’s deliberate strategy to encourage data collection and monitoring was also a key part of its efforts to construct a success narrative in collaboration with global policy actors. For the global‐level advocates of UHC, Turkey provided evidence that UHC works. Before it became a target under the health‐related Social Development Goals (SDGs), advocates needed to demonstrate that they had the right framing and metrics for a UHC agenda. After 2015, successful examples have served as strategic tools for building support and political momentum as the agenda was diffused, and as these diverse agendas and interests overlapped.Policy ImplicationsThis article contributes to the current debates on policy diffusion, translation and implementation of the UHC agenda. It unpacks the use of success stories to navigate the political dynamics among national governments and global policy communities. Success stories, alongside an emphasis on country ownership, may serve to encourage the co‐production of policy across local, national and global levels.

This paper studies how people across the world perceive and understand climate change and climate policies, which factors determine their support for climate action, and what type of information shifts their policy views. We design and run new largescale surveys on more than 40,000 respondents in 20 countries, covering the major greenhouse gas emitters in developed and developing economies. We thus provide new, comprehensive, international microdata on people's perceptions, understanding, and policy views related to climate change, combined with detailed background information on their socioeconomic characteristics, energy use, and lifestyles. We show that, across countries, support for climate policies hinges on three key perceptions centered around the effectiveness of the policies in reducing emissions (effectiveness concerns), their distributional impacts on lower-income households (inequality concerns), and their impact on the respondents' household (self-interest). In the experimental part, we show randomly selected subsamples pedagogical videos on either the impacts of climate change in their country or how major climate policies work -their effectiveness in reducing emissions and their distributional implications. Explaining how policies work and who can benefit from them is critical to fostering policy support, whereas simply informing people about climate change's impacts is ineffective.

This article explores an educational experiment mounted at a public school for girls in Bristol in the 1920s and 1930s. In examining the aims and methods of the Badminton School for girls in this period it aims to do two things. The first is to analyse the relationship between the gendered, class‐based and nationalist values of the public school system and the aspirations of progressive internationalism that Badminton sought to introduce. The second is to assess how that relationship influenced the citizenship‐building role that Badminton (as with all public schools) charged itself with in this period. In answering these questions it is useful to consider the work of Gary McCulloch and Colin McCaig who have reflected on the history of education in the light of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition. 1 McCulloch and McCaig argued that the headmaster of Harrow and leading defender of the public schools, Cyril Norwood, summoned the public school tradition in this period ‘as a direct response to threats, from rapid sociological and ideological change’. 2 Did the progressive public schools also ‘invent’ tradition in this way? How did the gender of the students and the ideology of the staff influence this process? The interwar period saw the rise of a number of schools that positioned themselves in opposition to the structures and ethos of the public schools but retained their class exclusivity and their confidence in education for leadership. The term ‘progressive’ was applied to schools that opposed the structures and ethos of the public school tradition root and branch, decrying their repressive moral codes, autocratic value systems and veneration of classical and athletic prowess. ‘Progressive’ has also been used to refer to schools that accepted the role of elite schooling in shaping models of citizenship and national leadership but aimed to subvert the value‐system of the public school tradition in order to mould new kinds of citizens and leaders. 3 As we shall see, Badminton was progressive in the latter sense. 1 Hobsbawm, E. “Introduction: inventing traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 2 McCulloch, G. and C. McCaig. “Reinventing the Past: The Case of the English Tradition of Education.” British Journal of Educational Studies, 50, no. 2 (2002): 241. 3 A 1934 publication titled The Modern Schools Handbook purported to be the ‘first book in which the heads of a representative selection of modern schools have described their aims and practice’. The editor used the foreword to the Handbook, in which Badminton featured, to distinguish between the two progressive streams, stressing that whilst ‘some rank as public schools, others are experimental’. Blewitt, T., ed. The Modern Schools Handbook. London: Gollancz, 1934: 1.

This paper aims to answer the following question: Did China's energy conservation policy work on industry? This study reviewed the development of China's energy conservation policies and then calculated China's industrial energy conservation rate and the amount of energy conservation between 1996 and 2014 with the Revised Divisia Index Method in order to assess the effectiveness of China's energy conservation policy. The results of this research show that: First, industrial structure adjustment, energy structure optimization, and energy pricing system reform were the major energy policy targets of both the Ninth Five-Year Plan and the Tenth Five-Year Plan periods to achieve the energy conservation rate of respective plans. Second, in addition to continuing all the above energy conservation policies, although China began to limit high energy-consuming industries through the compulsory Action for Energy Conservation of 1,000 Enterprises during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period and the Action for Energy Conservation and Emissions Reduction of 10,000 Enterprises during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period, none of them could slow the energy consumption caused by rapid industrial growth, making the industrial energy conservation target of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan difficult to achieve.

Questions have been posed about the lack of knowledge of the role public managers play in the policy process. In this study, following on the suggestions of Hicklin and Godwin and Meier in this journal, we identify different dimensions of the analyst–manager divide among professional policy workers. Using the results of several recent large‐N surveys of Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial policy workers, we explore the roles each group plays in the policy analytical process and the variations in their behavior in terms of duties and tasks, attitudes, and interrelationships. We also examine these to see the impact of federalism on professional policy practices. The study uncovers three groups of policy workers and policy managers—coordinator‐planners, research‐analysts, and director‐managers. Differences between groups of policy workers are found for their policy‐related work and their perceptions of tools of policy effectiveness, and differences between levels of government are identified for issues of time demands and coordination and tools of policy effectiveness. The implications of these findings for the study of public managers in the policy process are considered in conclusion.

China’s one-child policy, introduced in the late 1970s, has been in effect for over three decades. This article reviews China’s low fertility rate and the implementation of this stringent birth control policy in the context of low fertility. First, China’s fertility intention, behavior, and low fertility level trend are presented. Then, the official response to the low fertility level and the consequent misguided policy-making are investigated. Next, various obstacles to the abolishment of the strict birth control policy are discussed, including national leaders’ authority, related family planning regulations and laws, the inertia of this basic state policy under the auspices of the common good, the displacement of the family planning systems, and the necessity for social maintenance fees to keep grassroots governments in operation. After discussing the recent reform of this birth control policy in 2013 and the subsequent results, the incentives for a universal two-child policy are elucidated. These include the official acknowledgment of low fertility, the effect of birth control policy on fertility decline, the reactions of the general public, the attitudes of grassroots family planning cadres, the appeal from scholars, international experiences, the merging of population and family planning commissions, and national leaders’ attitudes. The paper concludes with an analysis of the cost of this birth control policy over the past decades.