Commissions, clubs, and consensus: Florida reorganizes for health reform.

Policy Capacity for Health Reform: Necessary but Insufficient; Comment on “Health Reform Requires Policy Capacity”

Forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. They offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. I would like to offer a Canadian perspective. If we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

Economic Reform, Growth and Convergence in China

In this paper, we propose a new concept of convergence which is based on the metric entropy measure recently proposed by Granger et al. (2004) to investigate economic convergence in China. This entropy measure compares whole distributions of growth rates across individual provinces. Separately, based on this same entropy measure, we also implement cluster analysis to identify any convergence cl...

Mental Health Commissions: making the critical difference to the development and reform of mental health services.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Several Mental Health Commissions (MHCs) have emerged in developed countries over recent years, often in connection with mental health reform strategies. It is timely to consider the types of MHC which exist in different countries, their characteristics which may contribute to making them more effective, and any possible limitations and concerns raised about them. RECENT FIN...

Sentencing Commissions and Their Guidelines

Sentencing commissions, administrative agencies charged to develop and promulgate standards for sentencing, were first proposed early in the 1970s and first established in 1978. Of four recent major sentencing reform approaches-the others being parole guidelines, voluntary sentencing guidelines, and statutory determinate sentences-only sentencing commission systems continue to be created. Despi...

How not to do medical malpractice reform: a Florida case study.