an important determinant of health system performance is contracting. providers often respond to financial incentives, despite the ethical underpinnings of medicine, and payers can craft contracts to influence performance. yet contracting is highly imperfect in both single-payer and multi-payer health systems. arguably, in a competitive, multi-payer environment, contractual innovation may occur...

Empirical evidence shows local government contracting is a dynamic process that includes movements from public delivery to markets and from market contracts back to in-house delivery. This ‘‘reverse contracting’’ reflects the complexity of public service provision in a world where market alternatives are used along with public delivery. We develop a methodology to link responses to national sur...

Governments engage with the private sector in several ways, one of which is through contractual agreements to provide services to the population on the governments’ behalf (the process of ‘contracting out’). The importance, feasibility and effectiveness of this contracting process in the health sector is disputed, particularly in states where the government is unable to adequately deliver funda...

1. An Amberlite XAD-2 column in a heated (37 degrees C) jacket was incorporated in between two banks of bioassay organs superfused with Krebs bicarbonate solution in cascade. The column removed prostaglandins, E1, E2 and F2alpha and also rabbit aorta contracting substance (RCS) and possibly slow reacting substance of anaphylaxis (SRS-A). 2. The column gave free passage to histamine in concentra...

With the formation of European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999, the eleven countries that adopted the Euro began to conduct a single monetary policy oriented towards unionwide objectives. The objective of this paper is to construct a small model of the Euro area, which may serve as a laboratory for evaluating the performance of alternative monetary policy strategies for the Euro area in the vein o...

With the explosive growth of internet activity, there will be an increasing reliance on intelligent software agents for electronic commerce and information retrieval. Such multi-agents systems will be comprised of self-motivated agents that interact with each other though negotiation and task delegation. Multi-agent technology models and facilitates these interactions through automated contract...