Over the past two decades many countries have undertaken to decentralize government functions and transfer authority and responsibilities from central to intermediate and local governments, and often to communities and the private sector. Decentralization is potentially important to agricultural knowledge and information systems, but decentralization is not an end in itself, and successful dece...

This commentary is a brief response to Nir Eyal’s argument that health policies should not make healthy behaviour a condition or prerequisite in order to access healthcare as it could result in the people who need healthcare the most not being able to access healthcare. While in general agreement due to the shared concern for equity, I argue that making health behaviour a condition to accessing...

One of the limitations of cross-country health expenditure analysis refers to the fact that the financing, the internal organization and political restraints of health care decision-making are country-specific and heterogeneous. Yet, a way through is to examine the influence of such effects in those countries that have undertaken decentralization processes. In such a setting, it is possible to ...

Background and Objectives. Values in the known weighting methods in Life Cycle Assessment are mostly founded by the societal systems of developed countries. What source of weights and which weighting methods are reliable for a big developing country like China? The purpose of this paper is to find a possible weighting method and available data that will work well for LCA practices conducted in ...

Do International Labor Standards Contribute to the Persistence of the Child Labor Problem? In recent years, a number of governments and consumer groups in rich countries have tried to discourage the use of child labor in poor countries through measures such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards. The purported objective of such measures is to reduce the incidenc...

T he onward march of globalisation is among the greatest economic and political stories of our era. Behind globalisation lie both deliberate policies of liberalisation and the revolution in communications and information technology. The latter, in turn, has allowed the emergence of integrated systems of production and distribution, managed by a new breed of global companies. The most important ...

We study the effect of decentralization on corruption in a political agency model from the perspective of a region. In a model where corruption opportunities are lower under centralization at each period of time, decentralization makes easier for citizens to detect corrupt incumbents. As a consequence, the relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption is conditional on political c...

This article has considered the volume and direction of Iran’s trade using the gravity model. The major issue in this analysis is to explore why Iran over or under-traded with the 76 countries relative to the predicted trade flows of the model. The study attempts to explore the reasons from the respect of both the model itself and Iran’s trade structure. This is done by analysing the performanc...