Citizen participation and electricity sector governance in Lithuania: current state and future perspectives

The size of the public sector is an important tool in public governance. Public sector size may fuel both economic growth and political influence over the economy.
By compiling and processing data from different sources of public accounts the paper aims at mapping the development of key financial indicators for the Norwegian central government sector during the transition period from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. The data enable us to give measures of the size of the public sector alone and compared to the overall economy.
It is found that the sector started its continuous growth before politicians deliberately started to increase the sector’s size of the total economy. The paper also finds that an increase of the public sector often, but not always, reflects political economy regimes. Persistent growth in public finances as a tool for economic policy making did not take place before the introduction of the social-democratic regime in 1935.
The paper also concludes that economic growth started before the growth in the public sector, suggesting that public sector growth might as well be a result of economic growth or vice versa.

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.

Global warming and climate change continue to disrupt the environment and all aspects of people’s endeavors and as such, there is need to look at causes of climate change and deploy appropriate tools to address the problem of the scourge of climate change. The bank holds a pivotal position in the economy of any country. Apart from being the custodian of money, they also collaborate with the government and international financial institutions to perform various roles that shape the direction of the world’s economy in terms of growth and development. Against the backdrop of this, this article looks at banks as part of the appropriate tools that should constantly be used to address and reduce the influence of fossil fuels that are fuelling global warming and climate change and switch to more sustainable green economy. In order to achieve this, there should be radical acceleration in advancing credit and loan facilities by banks to fund green projects and investments in order to decarbonize the economy, and at the same time maintain sustainable economic growth and development.