Background There is increasing interest in using systems thinking to tackle ‘wicked’ policy problems in preventive health, but this can be challenging for policy-makers because the literature is amorphous and often highly theoretical. Little is known about how best to support health policy-makers to gain skills in understanding and applying systems thinking for policy action.  <br /...

For approximately the last forty years industrial organization economists have undertaken empirical studies to determine if an increase in the number of producers results in more competitive market outcomes. In recent years a number of empirical studies, many under the inspiration and guidance of Leonard Weiss, have focused directly on the relationship between the price of output in a market an...

The literature on strategic alliances is vast. Most authors are pro-alliances and the casual reader may thereby be lulled into a false sense of security concerning the advantages of strategic alliances. There are several possible advantages of strategic alliances however by joining an alliance several opportunities are also forsaken. The opposite strategic option, a "go it alone strategy" gener...

This paper is concerned with the saddle-path stability of monetary growth rules in a two-country two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Alongside standard features of emerging economies, such as a combination of producer and local currency pricing for exports, fiscal dominance and oil exports, this model also incorporates informal labour and production sectors and examines how...

We consider longand medium-term production planning and hedging in a hydropower system under price and inflow uncertainty. The price uncertainty is modeled with a multidimensional forward curve model that considers time dependant spot volatility, the volatility curve’s maturity effect, and the forward curve’s correlation structure. We give a simple and intuitive parameterization for the optimal...

Nutrient availability and herbivory control the biomass of primary producer communities to varying degrees across ecosystems. Ecological theory, individual experiments in many different systems, and system-specific quantitative reviews have suggested that (i) bottom-up control is pervasive but top-down control is more influential in aquatic habitats relative to terrestrial systems and (ii) bott...

Agriculture plays a big role in Indian society and economy. Due to ensuring food security, agriculture is very important for India. India one of the largest producer world production increasing over years. Arrangement crop on piece land called pattern. Crop sowing pattern challenging task farmer policy makers because totally depends natural factors like rainfall, temperature, soil etc. The Mini...

Pierre-Gerlier Forest and his colleagues make a strong argument for the need to expand policy capacity among healthcare actors. In this commentary, I develop an additional argument in support of Forest et al view. Forest et al rightly point to the need to have embedded policy experts to successfully translate healthcare reform policy into healthcare change. Translation of externally generated i...