ESSAYS ON REGIONAL AMENITIES AND PUBLIC POLICIES By ELENA YEVGENYEVNA ANDREYEVA AUGUST, 2016 Committee Chair: Dr. Jorge Martinez-Vazquez Major Department: Economics This dissertation investigates how alterations in government policies affect the level of, and access to, public amenities, and how outcomes vary across space. The first essay sheds light on whether the recentralization of political...

Blockchain has received tremendous attention as a secure, distributed, and anonymous framework for the Internet of Things (IoT). As distributed system, blockchain trades off scalability distribution, which limits technology’s adaptation large scale networks such IoT. All transactions blocks must be broadcast verified by all participants incurs computational communication overheads. The existing...

BACKGROUND The Swedish government has increasingly begun to rely on so called informative governance when regulating healthcare. The question this article sets out to answer is: considered to be "the backbone" of the Swedish state's strategy for informative governance in healthcare, what kind of regulatory arrangement is the evidence-based National Guidelines? Together with national medical reg...

Dr Saltman has tried with his article to forecast a trend for the future development of health policy in Europe, a very difficult task. His analysis concludes that there is a new re-centralization in countries where decentralization has been the paradigm in healthcare policy. Although this is very interesting, I do not totally agree. In my comment to this article, I will review the evidence of ...

This article examines the emergence of city-region governance as a specific state spatial selectivity in post-reform China. The process has been driven by the state in response to the crisis of economic decentralization, and to vicious inter-city competition and uncoordinated development. As part of the recentralization of state power, the development of urban clusters (chengshiqun) as intercon...

Widespread pollution in the former Soviet Union (FSU) led Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr. to refer to the “ecocide” of Soviet citizens (Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege, New York: Basic Books, 1992). Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, in many ways and in many places the environmental situation has improved. One of the reasons for this was plummeting industrial prod...

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...