One central goal of the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and the more recent Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) is to free up additional resources for public spending on poverty reduction. The health sector was expected to benefit from a considerable share of these funds. The volume of released resources is important enough in certain countries to make a differ...

Money, when used as an incentive, activates the same neural circuits as rewards associated with physiological needs. However, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts: how are monetary stimuli identified in the first place? How and when does the brain identify a valid coin, i.e. a disc of metal that is, by social agreement, endowed with monetary properties? We took ...

A central behavioral assumption of economic theory is that income is fungible. Yet, building on the pioneering work by Thaler (1999) recent work by behavioural economists highlights that people code income in different mental accounts, creating a direct link between spending behaviour and income sources, thereby violating the fungibility assumption. This paper examines whether the marginal prop...

Background In planning for universal health coverage, many countries have been examining their fiscal decentralization policies with the goal of increasing efficiency and equity via “additionalities.” The concept of “additionality,” when the government of a lower administrative level increases the funding allocated to a particular issue when extra funds are present, is often used in these...

Almost all modelled emissions scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement's target of limiting global temperature increase to well below two degrees include use greenhouse gas removal (GGR) techniques. Despite prevalence GGR in Paris-consistent scenarios, and indeed UK's own net-zero target, there is a paucity regulatory support for emerging However, role carbon pricing one area that has expe...

There are significant weaknesses in some of the traditional justifications for assuming that aid will foster development. This paper looks at what the cross-country aid effectiveness literature and World Bank Operations Evaluation Department (OED) reviews have suggested about effective aid, first in terms of promoting income growth and then for promoting other goals. This review forms the basis...

Four principles underlie our recommendations for Great Britain's (GB) transmission charging arrangements: 1. Charges for the usage of the network should reflect the incremental costs imposed by that usage. 2. Charges to recover historic (sunk) capital costs and other fixed costs should distort usage as little as possible. 3. Environmental objectives are most efficiently pursued through mechanis...

ONE UNIVERSALLY acknowledged truth about the Victorians is that they loved their things.1 Deborah Cohen has recently argued that in nineteenthcentury England moral uplift came for the first time to be associated with the accumulation and harmonious arrangement of possessions; homedecoration turned into a saintly affair.2 The objects that pack Victorian parlors—aquaria, terraria, globes, books, ...

As we have argued throughout, language is always already political. Nevertheless, collegiate German studies curricula often seem largely indifferent to politics, especially those that complicate or disrupt the notion of as a singular with an indexical relationship nation-states which it associated. However, discourses such described in previous sections on linguistic indifference cultural produ...

This paper is about the changing character of housing assets, owned homes, and perhaps owner-occupiers themselves. It draws from two studies of UK homebuyers, whose lives are entangled in the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilisation of money. This mëlange is facilitated by a new generation of financial services that render housing wealth interchangeable with the cash ec...