Globalization is said to restrict severely the state’s capacity to fulfill its welfare function in advanced industrial societies. This paper tests empirically the redistributive capacity of the state operationalized as the difference in percent of households who live below 50% of the median income in their respective country before taxes and transfers and after taxes and transfers, based on the...

The esteemed health economist, Gavin Mooney, who died in tragic circumstances in December 2012, devoted his last book The Health of Nations: Towards a New Political Economy to exposing the pernicious effects of neoliberalism on healthcare. He argued compellingly that the consequences of ‘neoliberalism’ – in his usage, the reliance on market mechanisms to address all the needs of a society in th...

In the business world (which inches ever closer to the scientific world), terms such as “think out of the box” and “paradigm shift” are so in vogue that they are out of fashion. After all, the only people who actually think in boxes are the dead, and since the word “paradigm” does not mean anything, the term “paradigm shift” is just as meaningful (another corporatism) as “sausage shift.” Curren...

Thyroid Nodules and Other Incidentalomas: We Must Search for Evidence and Clarify Our Ethical Priorities A thyroid nodule will be incidentally discovered in 10%–60% of adults imaged for other reasons. The overwhelming majority of these lesions will be of no pertinence to the well-being of the patient. This unfortunate discovery may, however, initiate a sequence of events that includes additiona...

The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a relatively new theoretical perspective that adds complementary lens to the explanation of policy processes and change. Yet, key requirement valid process framework its capacity be proven wrong. Besides empirical cases provide evidence for occurrence programmatic action, it necessary present examples in which action did not occur, explain why this cas...

Is your practice framework not being appreciated? Constantly hitting brick walls and being frustrated by miscommunication? Feeling like you are mismatched with your environment? Having trouble getting your role clear? Conflicted about working ‘top down or bottom up’? Every community development worker knows all too well the stress of working in a situation where it feels like the goals of the o...

We use the Bertelsmann Foundation's Sustainable Government Indicators (SGI) to find out how executive efficiency and consensus capacity influence sustainable policy performance. Although those two concepts are often seen as opposites, we show that this is not case they can actually complement each other: separately well together, an efficient support more However, government a double-edged swor...

Some recent publications have raised the question of placing Ireland in a comparative perspective. Three such comparative frameworks are investigated in this paper: advanced capitalist countries, (West)European countries, and finally semi-peripheral European societies. Although not an advanced capitalist economy, Ireland displays the central institutional features of such societies. But on clos...

The purpose of this article is to explore the political dynamics of employer coordination in three well-known “coordinated market economies.” We examine differences in how employer coordination has been organized in Germany, Sweden, and Japan in the area of industrial relations, and we examine the extent to which such coordination represents a selfsustaining equilibrium, as some of the most inf...

This paper develops a comparative perspective on the evolution of states in the global political economy and the emergence of the regulatory states in that context. It sets out to question the utility of the regulatory state model for understanding contemporary states, and does so from two platforms. The first is to consider the broad applicability and relevance of the regulatory state model, a...