INTRODUCTION Major health-care reforms have extended across all Australian public hospitals in recent years. Improving emergency department (ED) access has been a focus of these reforms. OBJECTIVE This study evaluates how the national reforms have led to improvement in ED access in a regional hospital in remote Australia. METHODS Assessing a complex scenario such as national reforms and the...

BACKGROUND Regulation of the pharmaceutical sector is a challenging task for most governments in the developing countries. In Tanzania, this task falls under the Food and Drugs Authority and the Pharmacy Council. In 2010, the Pharmacy Council spearheaded policy reforms in the pharmaceutical sector aimed at taking over the control of the regulation of the business of pharmacy from the Tanzania F...

Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa--the countries known as BRICS--represent some of the world's fastest growing large economies and nearly 40% of the world's population. Over the last two decades, BRICS have undertaken health-system reforms to make progress towards universal health coverage. This paper discusses three key aspects of these reforms: the role of governme...

Many public sector reforms in developing countries fail to make governments more functional. This is typically because reforms introduce new solutions that do not fit the contexts in which they are being placed. This situation reflects what has recently been called the ‘capability trap’ in development—which results in many interventions producing new forms that are not functional in states acro...

Background: In 2009, New York reformed its “Rockefeller Drug Laws”, terminating mandatory imprisonment for many drug charges and expanding the availability of treatment alternatives to incarceration. The reforms occurred in an environment characterized by high incarceration rates, racial/ethnic disparities in drug convictions and incarceration rates, and expanded use of alternatives to incarcer...

Life expectancy has shot up in recent decades. When public pension systems were first established, people could typically look forward to only a few years of retirement if any. Today, globally, the probability of a newborn boy surviving until age 65 is over 80%; the figure is over 90% for a girl child. Aging populations are “a high-class” problem, said U.S. President Bill Clinton in his 1999 St...

Fiscal Policy assumes a central place in the overall macroeconomic framework. As government sector and private sector compete for resources and for consumption in the economy, fiscal policy needs to be designed in a framework where an increase in government activity would result in net gains to the economy even when it may negatively impact in private sector activity, or reduce foreign exchange...

We demonstrate a negative relationship between pro-market reforms and the sustainability of superior profits in an emerging economy. The decline in sustainability of superior profits shows that pro-market reforms bring significant threats in addition to the various opportunities such as greater availability of production factors and greater freedom to enter and operate businesses highlighted in...

In constructing our sample, we started with the work of Maskus (2000), who used the National Trade Estimates Reports on Foreign Trade Barriers and other publications to identify a series of significant patent reforms. Since this set of reforms does not appear to be exhaustive, we consulted two additional sources. Qian (2004) provides a list of countries that made substantial changes to patent l...

It is widely accepted that the deficiencies in public sector health system can only be overcome by significant reforms. The need for reforms in India s health sector has been emphasized by successive plan documents since the Eighth Five-Year Plan in 1992, by the 2002 national health policy and by international donor agencies. The World Bank (2001:12,14), which has been catalytic in initiating h...