International financial institutions have played an increasing role in the formation of social policy in Latin American countries over the last two decades, particularly in health and pension programs. World Bank loans and their attached policy conditions have promoted several social security reforms within a neoliberal framework that privileges the role of the market in the provision of health...

INTRODUCTION Since 2000, primary care (PC) reforms have been implemented in various Canadian provinces. Emerging organizational models and policies are at various levels of implementation across jurisdictions. Few cross-provincial analyses of these reforms have been realized. The aim of this study is to identify the factors that have facilitated or hindered implementation of reforms in Canadian...

Structural reforms that reduce product and labor market markups in peripheral Europe by 10 percentage points can improve competitiveness in that region and boost unionwide output by almost 5%. If implemented during a crisis that takes the nominal interest rate to its lower bound, however, these reforms have short-run contractionary effects of more than 1% on impact, thus deepening the recession...

This paper summarizes the trend toward introducing markets into the education sector. We begin with a brief history of the market reforms and then review recent policy developments related to vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and educational management organizations. The internal anatomy of markets are then described, recognizing both the possibility of imperfect competition and o...

The democratization that took place in Japan over the latter half of the twentieth century led to local governments achieving a degree of autonomy that allowed them to manage aspects of public policy in such areas as regional development, welfare, environmental development, and government information disclosure. As these local authorities increasingly became active players in the policymaking p...

A few decades ago a dominant view in the developing world was that growth problems in developing countries could be best understood in terms of the international environment. Today no one seriously questions the influence of external conditions on growth. But most economists would also emphasize structural conditions within developing countries as key determinants of the large differences in th...

A key question facing researchers of intimate partner violence is how the real-life contexts of victims' lives should affect state policy. The bulk of recently adopted and much touted criminal justice reforms have taken the form of relatively inflexible, one-size-fits-all mandatory responses focused on counseling, restraining, and punishing batterers. Even the protection order system relies far...

Since the late 1980s, technological advances and policy reforms have created new opportunities for private-sector investment in India’s seed and agricultural biotechnology industries. These changes have had a significant impact on cotton yields and output in India, but less so for rice and wheat—the country’s main cereal staples—for which yield growth rates are tending toward stagnation. This a...

We draw some lessons from the Tunisian experience of social reforms and associated civil conflict. Our main interest is the riots that occurred after subsidy cuts and their possible substitution of price subsidies by direct cash transfers. We propose new welfare indicators apt to assess policy reforms in situations of fragile states. Finally, using micro level data we show that the plausible po...

Ð This paper assesses the Argentine stabilization and market reform strategies since 1989. We argue that Argentina may be penned in by its own success: exchange rate targeting quelled in ̄ation but the resulting real appreciation has limited export and employment growth; microeconomic reforms raised eciency but have threatened income distribution and hence political stability; exclusive styles ...