China enacted a rural tax reform known as the “Tax-for-Fee Reform” (TFR) in the late 1990s, in large part driven by an attempt to address farmers’ complaints about their perception of a heavy tax burden. A crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform actually improved farmers’ welfare. This paper applies several estimation methods, including both cross-sectional propensity score match...

A central problem in designing effective models of provider governance in health systems has been to ensure an appropriate balance between the concerns of public sector and/or government decision-makers, on the one hand, and of non-governmental health services actors in civil society and private life, on the other. In tax-funded European health systems up to the 1980s, the state and other publi...

Jo Ivey Boufford, a paediatrician and formerly President of New York City public hospital system spent almost four years working in the UK, 20 months as Director of the King's Fund College. She returned to the United States in September 1993 and now has a pivotal role in developing and implementing the public health care sector as part of the Clinton reforms. Below are some of her reflections o...

On June 6, 2016, as a mode expected to open a new prospect for tiered system of medical care in China, family physicians contracted healthcare was officially launched, intending to facilitate such healthcare be universal coverage by 2020.There are some doubts as to whether this goal is possible. The role of family physicians contracted healthcare in China should also be carefully identified. We...

BACKGROUND China has the second highest caseload of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in the world. In 2009, the Chinese government agreed to draw up a plan for MDR-TB prevention and control in the context of a comprehensive health system reform launched in the same year. DISCUSSION China is facing high prevalence rates of drug-resistant TB and MDR-TB. MDR-TB disproportionally affects...

Health reform is the outcome of dispersed policy initiatives in different sectors, at different levels and across time. Policy work which can drive coherent health reform needs to operate across the governance structures as well as the institutions that comprise healthcare systems. Building policy capacity to support health reform calls for clarity regarding the nature of such policy work and t...