The Clinton Administration has implied that short-run failures to control health care costs may cause a reexamination of wage and price controls as elements of comprehensive health care reform. The most recent imposition of mandatory wage and price controls was the Economic Stabilization Program (ESP) of the early 1970s. We analyze trends in hospitals' economic behavior and utilization before, ...

Britain was the exemplar of electricity market reform, demonstrating the importance of ownership unbundling and workable competition in generation and supply. Privatisation created de facto duopolies that supported increasing price-cost margins and induced excessive (English) entry. Concentration was ended by trading horizontal for vertical integration in subsequent mergers. Competition arrived...

This paper applies the recently developed econometric methods of panel unit root tests and non-linear mean-reversion to investigate price convergence in China --the largest transitional economy in the world. We find that prices did converge to the law of one price in China for an overwhelming majority of goods and services based on a large panel dataset. The finding sheds light on the extent of...

Traditional indicators of protection refer to the level effect of price policies on income and ignore the stabilizing effect. We derive a measure of the real rate of protection which incorporates these dual dimensions. The income stabilizing effects of price policy protection lead to a greater level of real protection than would be measured conventionally. Without compensatory payments real pro...

A regulated upstream monopolist supplies an essential input to firms in a downstream market. Non-price discrimination or sabotage becomes a concern when the upstream monopolist vertically integrates downstream. This article develops a simulation algorithm to determine the likelihood that discrimination will arise in equilibrium using data from the US long-distance market. Based on 1000 random d...

During the past two years, Chinese joint-stock companies have been converting nontradable stock held by the state and state-controlled institutions, which constitute twothirds of all stock in Chinese firms, into stock that can trade on local exchanges. This ownership reform reduces direct state control over industrial enterprises. It also greatly increases the supply of stock, which threatens t...

Policy reforms outside agriculture in the early 1990s accelerated growth in per capita incomes and food demand and also improved the terms of trade for the agriculture. Agricultural policies and institutions, traditionally focused on achieving food grain self sufficiency within a closed economy, have, however, been slow to adapt to a new environment of diversifying demand, more open markets, an...

Telex 411 144 ecb d All rights reserved. Reproduction for educational and non-commercial purposes is permitted provided that the source is acknowledged. The cutoff date for the statistics included in this report was 27 February 2001.

The Agricultural Reform Implementation Programme (ARIP), which was adopted under the aegis of a World Bank-financed Structural Adjustment Programme between 2001-2008, aimed to ‘lock in’ the neoliberal hegemony that had been developing in Turkey since the early 1980s by transforming the nation’s agrarian political economy. For hazelnut-producing petty peasant groups of the Black Sea Region, this...