Excise taxes on sugary beverages have been proposed as a method to replicate the public health success of tobacco control and to generate revenue. As policymakers increase efforts to pass sugary beverage taxes, they can anticipate that manufacturers will emulate the strategies employed by tobacco companies in their attempts to counteract the impact of such taxes. Policymakers should therefore c...

This paper reports data from semi-structured interviews on how 26 Australian civil servants, ministers and ministerial advisors find and evaluate researchers with whom they wish to consult or collaborate. Policymakers valued researchers who had credibility across the three attributes seen as contributing to trustworthiness: competence (an exemplary academic reputation complemented by pragmatism...

The effectiveness of nudges in raising the welfare of the population hinges on the policymakers employing them. A frequent criticism based on a logical inconsistency questions policymakers' immunity from the psychological biases of individuals that are the very foundation of nudging interventions. We argue that, rather than being concerned about policymakers' incapacity to raise the population'...

Recently an abundance of experimental evidence has been gathered that is consonant with the notion that individual preferences are inconsistent and unstable. These empirical results potentially undermine the theoretical foundation of welfare economics, as the degree of preference lability claimed suggests that perhaps no optimization principles underlie even the most straightforward of choices....

OBJECTIVES We studied the impact of globalization on the making of health policy. Globalization is understood as economic interdependence among nations. The North American Free Trade Agreement is used as a marker to assess the effects of economic interdependence on binational health cooperation along the United States-Mexico border. METHODS We observed participants and conducted in-depth inte...

Actual federal funds rates in the U.S. have, at times, deviated from the recommendations of a simple Taylor rule. This paper proposes a “nowcasting” Taylor rule that preserves the form of the Taylor rule but encompasses realistic assumptions on information observable to policymakers. Because contemporaneous inflation rates and output gaps are not observable at the time policy is set, policymake...

Most research on corruption attitudes focuses exclusively voters, despite the strategic role of political elites in anticorruption efforts. To fill this gap, we study drivers perceptions among legislators, using comparative longitudinal survey data over 3000 policymakers 18 Latin American countries. We develop a novel theoretical framework based influence motivated reasoning and moderating effe...

I examine why South Africa's pioneering Pholela model of primary health care, dating from the 1940s, held such appeal for the country's new policymakers after 1994, and why those policymakers have failed to make it the basis of an effective public health care system since then. In the 1940s, the innovative Pholela experiment had served as such a model, to be replicated gradually throughout the ...