Quality issues strike the classical conflict in a democratic health-care delivery system of different interests among the politicians, the medical profession and public officials. This cannot be studied as a cut-off whiz. Quality registers have developed over the past 40 years. Therefore, this paper puts the innovation of quality registers in an institutional perspective. Two things are essenti...

The traditional view that excise taxes are regressive has been challenged. I document the history of the term regressive tax, show that traditional definitions have always found cigarette taxes to be regressive, and illustrate the implications of the greater price responsiveness observed among the poor. I explain the different definitions of tax burden: accounting, welfare-based willingness to ...

Exploring an alternative way to approach famine relief interventions, this paper draws on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault and David Keen's recent work on south-west Sudan. It suggests that different discourses on 'famine' can lead to the dominance of certain kinds of institutional practices, and the prioritisation of special kinds of knowledge, at the expense of other modes of un...

Based on a panel data analysis of 164 countries from 1996 to 2006, we examine the impact of institutional quality on foreign direct investment (FDI) levels and volatility. We find that good institutional quality matters to FDI. We provide evidence that institutional quality has a positive and significant effect on FDI. More specifically, we find that a one standard deviation change in instituti...