Should the Federal Reserve or any other government agency make precise statements about its policy objectives? Determining the proper amount of secrecy in government generates controversy whether the agency involved undertakes espionage, banking, or monetary policy. Between the broad areas of agreement (classifying military strategies, publishing legislation) lie equally broad areas of contenti...

This is the first in a series of articles to be published serially in the Psychiatric Bulletin on recent government policy and legislation. Each article will describe a different piece of legislation and place it in its international perspective, highlighting how it will affect individual psychiatric practice, users of mental health services and the working relationship with purchasers and mana...

In modern society, the importance of information is constantly growing. Human life has been diversely changed due to the volume expansion of information handling and distribution. The rapid growth and informatization of information and communications technology (ICT) could be the driver of the production and distribution of information in the real world. Also, it has greatly influenced the econ...

This paper examines optimal policy when agents, private investors and a government, can learn about the economy by observing others. Investors can delay investment in order to exploit future information. Importantly, investors ignore the informational value of their actions to others when deciding: this externality results in inefficiently high delay, motivating government intervention. The gov...

Background Government policy measures have a key role to play in the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The Caribbean, a middle-income region, has the highest per capita burden of NCDs in the Americas. Our aim was to examine policy development and implementation between the years 2000 and 2013 on NCD prevention and control in Barbados, and to investigate factors promotin...

Background Despite decades of evidence gathering and calls for action, few countries have systematically attenuated health inequities (HI) through action on the social determinants of health (SDH). This is at least partly because doing so presents a significant political and policy challenge. This paper explores this challenge through a review of the empirical literature, asking: what factors h...