Should the assessment of government policies, such as the provision of public goods and the control of externalities, deviate from first-best principles to account for distributive effects and for the distortionary cost of labor income taxation? For example, is the optimal extent of public goods provision smaller than indicated by the Samuelson rule because finance is distortionary? Or should e...

Performance measurement is generally depicted as a neutral, technical exercise providing objective data for decision-making. But it also has a normative role in framing policy problems and solutions. This article explores the role of indicators in shaping child welfare, comparing stated policy with performance indicator regimes in England. It shows how indicators construct child welfare narrowl...

I show that in a multidimensional spatial model, if an agent is risk neutral on each side of the policy space away from her ideal point, then her utility function is linearly decreasing in the city block distance to the ideal policy of the agent.

After some successes and many mis-steps, the regulatory environment surrounding technology policy is transforming. Lessons taken from content, copyright, and cryptography policy processes, amongst many others, resulted in the emergence of a number of technology policy innovations. Two particular innovations are the internationalization of policy-setting, and the trend towards technology-neutral...

Contemporary pervasive computing environments demand mechanism for coherently addressing high-level user needs despite changing availability of resources. We propose the formalization of goals as the semantic basis for this mechanism, and sketch a system architecture that separates policy-rich goals-level planning code from a policy-neutral component assembly model.

BACKGROUND Health policy analysis is important for all health policies especially in fields with ever changing evidence-based interventions such as HIV prevention. However, there are few published reports of health policy analysis in sub-Saharan Africa in this field. This study explored the policy process of the introduction of male circumcision (MC) for HIV prevention in Uganda in order to inf...

This paper examines the effectiveness of fiscal policy in a general equilibrium macromodel with transactions money and an oligopolistic product market. The results suggest that although money may be neutral and play no direct role as policy instrument, its indirect impact on the effectiveness of fiscal policy can be quite substantial. In particular, (i) fiscal policy becomes ineffective as the ...

• There are three main reasons for this policy shift. First, there is evidence that the Chinese economy has been operating below its potential capacity. Second, among the big five economies, China’s monetary policy stance and broader financial condition both tightened the most in the wake of the global financial crisis, likely weighing on domestic growth. Third, a mix of easy monetary policy an...