Initiatives, public trust, and citizen engagement during crises: A comparative analysis across Baltic states

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected different sectors of the economy, including insurance, and has become a problem and a clear catalyst for innovation. The pandemic has highlighted some inefficiencies of the traditional model of interaction between insurers and their customers and focused on insurance companies’ efforts on innovations and investments in the digital future. That is why the article aims to generalize the transformations of the institutional environment in the InsurTech ecosystem in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and identify prospects for its development in the post-pandemic period.
The analysis of the functioning of InsurTech as an ecosystem necessitated the identification of challenges for the insurance market in the context of COVID-19. The peculiarities of the insurance market development have been identified: the blurring of boundaries between insurers, BigTech firms, and technological partners; expanding interaction with policyholders based on the principle of support and the use of social networks; changes in the structure of the implemented insurance services; an increase in insurance fraud cases; the growing demand for parametric insurance products; introduction of a digital approach to the interaction with customers and employees, modernization of technological infrastructure and expansion of data processing capabilities; remote risk identification; acceleration in the use of financial technologies by insurance market participants. There is a transformation of the insurance market under the influence of business processes digitalization because insurers are aware of the importance of InsurTech in the formation of competitive advantages.
For many companies, the crisis has strengthened their innovative development strategies and accelerated the implementation of financial technology tools in their business processes against the background of modernization of technological infrastructure. Chatbots, telematics, the Internet of Things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, etc., are widely used. In the future, InsurTech will also play an important role in introducing digital innovations in the insurance market.

This study was prompted by the fact that no research study focused on the application of the Open Contracting principle of disclosure in South African public procurement. The main issue examined in this study pertained to the application of the disclosure principle of Open Contracting in the South African public procurement system. The study population included members of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply Chain (CIPS) employed in the South African public service. This research study used applied, exploratory and non-experimental research in conjunction with descriptive and inferential statistics. The measuring instrument designed for this study included an online survey containing a structured, close-ended questionnaire that measured the disclosure aspect covered in an in-depth literature study. With regard to the results obtained from this study, it is evident that the respondents indicated that there are opportunities to adopt the disclosure principle within South African public procurement. This study provides definite guidelines to procurement practitioners and policy makers concerning the application of proactively disclosing information at the different stages of government procurement. Disclosure in public procurement is rapidly changing and the South African public sector should keep abreast of such changes (e.g., the use of Open Contracting) to ensure that its procurement system is suitably equipped to deliver better deals, minimize fraud and corruption, ensure high quality of performance and a fairer business environment.

The paper presents a study, which describes the current governance model of the electricity sector in Lithuania. Electricity and energy production and distribution is highly regulated worldwide. This is also true in Lithuania, where the electricity sector is highly politically prominent, and policy is highly centralized. There are geopolitical concerns towards Russia, which is an important supplier of electricity, and Lithuania’s grid is highly integrated with that of Russia. In addition, Lithuania is a small country dominated by a small number of large state-owned producers and has no regional administrations. Lithuania rhetorically has adopted increased citizen participation as a strategic policy goal. The study investigates how far the rhetorics are followed up by policy planning, implementation, and development of new governance modes. The authors base the study on interviews with 19 experts and regulation analysis. The study found that regulation process is transparent, but this causes lower public interest and consequently lower citizen participation. Existing stakeholder involvement at the policy level is highly arbitrary and favorable to large electricity producers. As production is set to decentralize, this has the potential to overburden the regulatory system and cause conflict between different producers.