Welcome to Public Money & Management’s first issue of our 37th volume and the first of 2017. In this issue we mark a change in the editorial team and I would like to begin the volume and the year by thanking Professor Sheila Ellwood, Professor of Financial Reporting, University of Bristol, for her three years of service as Deputy Editor of Public Money & Management. Sheila has been an assiduous, hard-working and thorough Deputy Editor, taking on responsibility for the papers with a financial and budgeting perspective; in essence being the money part of Public Money & Management. We are grateful to her for her dedication and hard work, as she brought her wisdom and experience to bear on three volumes of papers, including a very successful and innovative theme issue on ‘Public sector accounting internationally’ (Public Money & Management, Vol. 36, No. 3, April 2016). The papers and articles in that theme built on an earlier issue of Public Money & Management and highlighted the continued diversity in accounting internationally and in her editorial (p. 157) Sheila called for ‘Much more research … to establish the benefits and drawbacks of different public sector accounting approaches in different institutional settings’.
Sheila Ellwood is succeeded by Professor Andreas Bergmann, Professor of Public Finance, ZHAW, Switzerland. Andreas graduated from the Universities of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and Lancaster (UK), and he then received his PhD from the University of St. Gallen. After a career at the State of Zurich Ministry of Education, he joined Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in 1999 and became a full professor in 2002. He served the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB) as a public member from 2006, and from 2010 to the end of 2015 as its chair. He has been a member of SRS-CSPCP, the Swiss national accounting standard setter for the public sector since 2008. He is a CIPFA honorary member, a delegate of the Swiss Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities and various other academic and professional bodies. We are delighted to welcome him as a member of the editorial team and look forward working with him over the coming years.
In this issue, global problems and those more close to the UK are addressed by our authors. We start with a debate piece by Laurence Ferry and Peter Eckersley (p. 2) discussing the possible fallout from the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum. This is going to be a continuing item for discussion in the political, financial and academic worlds and it would be interesting to see some more work from authors in those states that remain within the EU. It may be quietly suspected that for many of them the exit of the UK from the transnational club will cause far more hardship and uncertainty for those that remain than for the UK and its fairly robust economy. But all of this is simple speculation until the divorce and financial settlement have run their course and the contending parties agree into whose custody the family possessions are divided.
The broader global concerns of this issue explore talent management in the public sector of the BRICS (Pan Suk Kim and Alexander Kotchegura, see p. 7), then several papers reconnoitring the impact of public savings and cutback management in comparative countries and a paper exploring the impact of spending reviews as seen through social media. We close with a new development article that reports on turning around failing schools in Lahore, continuing our evolving interest in bringing global lessons of best practice and ‘what works’ to our academic and practitioner readers (see Sidra Irfan and Sandra Nutley on p. 69).
With our Managing Editor based in the USA and now Andreas based in Switzerland, the journal is taking a broader global view of developments and innovations in the public sector. We remain, however, the journal of the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, and it is our responsibility to bring forth from that base the very best in current academic research and practitioner impact that we can publish in order to support the constant passage of improvement in public sector management. The marriage between research and practitioner impact is core to Public Money & Management’s mission and we begin the new year with a collection of papers that we believe deliver on that important purpose.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Massey
Andrew Massey is Editor of Public Money & Management and Professor of Public Administration, University of Exeter, UK