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...

This paper brings together three related but distinct concepts to offer a framework with which to understand and compare the governance arrangements for learning and skills in the UK; local governance, local autonomy and local democracy. Each of these three concepts has potential relevance to understanding the context of learning and skills policy and the potential and constraints upon reform: ...

This study mapped the movements of Permanent Health Education in the region of Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil, begun by the Permanent Health Education Facilitators program, promoted by the Ministry of Health and the National School of Public Health. This qualitative study was grounded on the theoretical framework of institutional and schizoanalysis. Data were collected from operative groups of i...

Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and ob...

Study Design: The architecture fulfils five desiderata: (1) adopt a distributed approach to data storage to protect privacy, (2) enable strong institutional autonomy to engender participation, (3) provide oversight and transparency to ensure patient trust, (4) allow variable levels of access according to investigator needs and institutional policies, (5) define a self-scaling architecture that ...

Together with the United States and Canada, Switzerland is one of the three classical federations. Its institutional structure consists of three levels of government: the federation, 26 cantons and about 2500 communes. The cantons as well as the communes are characterised by a full political organisation with the separation of powers, by a constitutionally guaranteed political autonomy and by t...