Electricity subsidies in Indonesia remain high and tend to increase. Existing studies generally propose electricity subsidy reform through economic price adjustment; however, this option potentially arises political social conflicts. The government the State Company have also undertaken several measures decrease supply costs but those ineffective due increasing energy prices needed as fuels for...

In California, personal health care expenditures are estimated to total more than $367 billion in 2016. Approximately 71 percent of these expenditures will be paid for with public funds (i.e., taxpayer dollars). This estimated contribution of public funds to health care expenditures is much higher than estimates that include only major health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Se...

Health reform is helping to transform the health insurance marketplace and facilitate new opportunities to reevaluate and restructure the underlying framework of employer-sponsored benefits. Central to these opportunities is the emergence of public health exchanges at the state and federal levels offering a coordinated platform of diverse designs and health plans available on a guaranteed issue...

Public hospital reform in China since the mid 1980s has had detrimental effects on hospitals' social functions, especially the provision of care for poor people. This study of hospitals in Northern China, using a range of economic measurements, indicated that there has been an overall decline in social functions since 1985, especially in secondary and tertiary level hospitals. Reason for this i...

Many governments subsidize regional rail service as an alternative to road traffic. This paper assesses whether increases in service frequency reduce road traffic externalities. We exploit differences in service frequency growth by procurement mode following a railway reform in Germany to address endogeneity of service growth. Increases in service frequency reduce the number of severe road traf...

The strength of President Bill Clinton's health reform proposal lies in its commitment to universal, portable health insurance. To enhance the political appeal of his plan, however, the president has forged a compromise between two divergent ethical precepts: (1) that health care is a social good to be made available to all Americans, on equal terms, at a financial burden roughly proportional t...

Prior research has debated the relative importance of such factors as human capital, political capital and region in determining workers' earnings in reform-era urban China. This article argues that a main agent of social stratification in contemporary China continues to be the danwei, the work unit. Using data from a 1999 survey we conducted in three large Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shanghai and X...

Diet includes many risk factors for the most common non-communicable diseases (NCDs), but diets consumed in Europe and in other parts of the developed world are not being modified sufficiently to take account of health priorities concerning, in particular, the prevention of NCDs, while much excess mortality and morbidity could be prevented by government actions to regulate appropriately both th...

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation. Additional literature is motivated by the possibility that distributive concerns should amend the internalization prescription. I...

In a polarized political setting, public policy evolves in response to pressures on and from institutions. These institutions include broad social structures, formal organizations (such as regulatory agencies), and support systems (like civil service). This study uses water and sanitation policies in Bolivia to illustrate how institutional reform at all three levels lacked legitimacy in the eye...