Like many welfare states, France is faced with increasing demand for long term care (LTC) services. Public LTC coverage has evolved over the past 15 years, reaching a coverage depth of 70%. Nonetheless, it does not provide adequate and equitable financial protection for the growing number of frail elderly individuals, who are expected to constitute 3% of the population by the year 2060. Since 2...

BACKGROUND In Finland, dental services are provided by a public (PDS) and a private sector. In the past, children, young adults and special needs groups were entitled to care and treatment from the public dental services (PDS). A major reform in 2001 - 2002 opened the PDS and extended subsidies for private dental services to all adults. It aimed to increase equity by improving adults' access to...

Economists would have formulated several aspects of the health care reform debate differently than policy entrepreneurs did. Economists would have questioned whether health care costs must be contained and whether either competition or global budgets were a "magic bullet" for doing so. They also would have emphasized the distortive costs of subsidies and taxes necessary to reach universal cover...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to explore the effects of national targeted subsidies policy on health behavior of Iranian households. METHODS In this qualitative study, data were collected between January 2012 and December 2013 through face-to-face interviews (23 experts in national and provincial levels of health system and 18 household heads) and through a comprehensive and purposive document ...

Family farming, crop science and ‘globalisation’ together largely determine progress against poverty. Faster in 1960-90 than at any time in world history, such progress has slowed down. So have ‘land reform’ and science-based rises in small farmers’ staples food productivity, while aid to agriculture has fallen by over two-thirds and farm prices have been further forced down (and farm science d...

abstractthe reform of energy subsidies has affected economic growth, as a result of household and firms’ behavior. however, despite the energy consumption and economic growth decrease in the short run, it is expected that economic growth will increase as a result of an adjustment in economic agents’ behavior over the mid- and long-terms. as is appropriate with these changes, energy consumption ...

BACKGROUND Improving the equitable benefit distribution of government health subsidies, particularly among the country's poorer socioeconomic groups, is a major goal of China's healthcare sector reform. METHODS Benefit incidence analysis was employed to measure the distribution of government health subsidies by income quintile. The concentration index (CI) of different levels of health care f...

Mortgage markets are coming of age in a number of Eastern Europe and CIS countries. As they do, governments are looking to mortgage-loan associated subsidy schemes to respond to the popular demand for improved housing. This paper presents a detailed examination of the impact of two types of subsidy schemes—mortgage interest rate write-downs, both universal and income-targeted, and income-target...

This paper uses a numerical general equilibrium model to evaluate the welfare impacts of alternative agri-environmental policies in an open economy while recognizing the presence of distortionary agricultural support subsidies and factor income taxes. In this context, the paper indicates that a revenue-neutral budget reform, which cuts all distortionary agricultural support subsidies and pays r...

Since the mid-1990s there has been a concerted effort to encourage fisheries sustainability by targeting large-scale, high-catch fisheries and by raising consumer awareness. Because of the often slow pace of regulatory approaches, this voluntary, market-oriented effort has been structured so as to avoid government involvement. But have smallscale fisheries, our best option for sustainable use o...