The Chinese system of government relief supplies: from the perspective of knowledge management

Abstract

Purpose Public crisis often generates new knowledge that should be incorporated into a government’s macro-control to ensure the relief supply. From the perspective of public crisis knowledge management, the Chinese system of Government relief supplies can be considered as a special case of the knowledge system. This paper aims to investigate the supply and production mechanism of relief goods and explore the advantages of the Chinese system when a sudden public crisis occurs. Design/methodology/approach Under the Chinese system, the authors construct a relief supply chain model consisting of the Chinese Government, one manufacturer and one supplier, where the supplier has no capital constraints. Given the demand for relief goods, the government purchases from the manufacturer with a guide price. Then, the manufacturer decides on its order quantity and offers a wholesale price to the supplier. The supplier has a random capacity and decides on the level of knowledge acquisition to improve its capacity. Findings The authors first obtain the analytical solution for the manufacturer to motivate a high level of knowledge acquisition from the supplier. Specifically, the manufacturer’s optimal order quantity is equal to the demand and the optimal wholesale price has a cost-plus form that reimburses the supplier for its production cost and knowledge-acquisition cost. Next, the authors derive the optimal guide price for the government, which should be set to subsidize the manufacturer with a proportion of the sourcing cost. Finally, the authors compare the Chinese system with the market mechanism where the supplier has capital constraints and confirm that the Chinese system is more beneficial to both the manufacturer and the government. Originality/value Quantitative research on the Chinese system of Government relief supplies is difficult to be conducted. This paper provides feasible and practical methods to quantify the benefits of the Chinese system. The results reveal that the Chinese system is an effective mechanism of public crisis knowledge management, which can be helpful to the government’s policy-making in practice.

Factors affecting e-government adoption in the UAE public sector organisations: the knowledge management perspective

“…No doubt this study advances existing studies in the field of technology adoption especially on G2G studies. Although Ali et al (2018) and Xing et al (2021) researched on e-government, it was to determine the relationship between e-government and digital economy (Ali et al , 2018) and government’s macro-control for relief supply for dealing with public crisis knowledge management. While studies by Bansal et al (2022), Habib et al (2020), Chan et al (2021) and Stratu-Strelet et al (2021) acknowledge that certain factors influence the successful adoption of e-government, this study went further by identifying the factors that lead to successful and effective adoption of e-government for innovation governance, a unique contribution with implications for both theory and practice in governance and public sector departments.…”