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This book is written with an acute awareness of the need for new insight to ensure (1) universal protection in basic healthcare; (2) providing choice; (3) efficient production and consumption of healthcare services; (4) financial sustainability of the healthcare system. Defining the public interest as the welfare of the "representative individual" with no vested interest who imagines himself to have equal chance of being anyone in society, this book explores alternative ways of finance and delivery, the optimal interface between the public healthcare sector and the private healthcare sector, and that between public insurance and private insurance. The book includes a theoretical but non-technical section that distinguishes between the stock of health and functional health, proposes a utility maximizing/behavioural framework to explain behaviour and the role of health policy and investigates the nature of risk and alternative insurance mechanisms. The book illustrates with a number of country studies, covering a large range of healthcare systems from the American and the European systems to various Asian systems as well as those of Australia and New Zealand. The survey of country...

Principles of Public Policy Practice was written with policy makers, concerned citizens, and students of public policy in mind. Striving to avoid technical language, the author introduces a new paradigm that starts from the commonality of human nature and the assumption that public policy should be impartial. Rather than playing the interests of one group versus those of another, he argues convincingly that public policy should aim at enhancing the ex ante welfare for everyone if everyone did not know the position or the identity one would assume. Using this conceptual device of the representative individual, the analysis readily leads to policy implications that are both reasonable and concrete in diverse areas ranging from health care, crime and punishment to macroeconomic and financial market stability. The book concludes with a chapter summarizing the various principles of public policy practice that will meet the challenges of the new millennium. These principles, certainly of interest to academics in social sciences who are studying public policy, political economy, international financial systems, and capital markets, should appeal equally to practitioners, including public ...

It is often assumed that shareholders have rights, not duties. In recent years, however, this assumption has come under intense scrutiny in all aspects of company law and capital market law -legislation, the courts, soft law, and scholarship - and, in Europe especially, major changes are under way across a diverse spectrum all the way from revised contractual arrangements to mandatory statutory provisions. Such a shift has important implications for the fundamentals of European company law, and there is a need to examine shareholders' duties and to consider where this trend is taking shareholders and their stance in law. This focused collection of essays by twenty notable scholars addresses this complex subject from a highly informative and useful variety of perspectives. Examining shareholders' duties along three axes - types of investee companies, types of shareholders, and types of business situations - the essays deal with such topics and issues as the following: - shareholders' duties as reflections of the interests they are intended to safeguard; - shareholders' duties to society; - shareholders' disclosure obligations; - duties of parent companies; - institutional...

Ours is an era when human genes can be copied and patented. From genetically modified foods to digital piracy, the concept of intellectual property (IP) and the laws upholding it play a foundational role in our society, but its political and ideological dimensions have rarely been understood outside of specialist circles. This collection cuts through the legal jargon that so often surrounds IP, to provide both a comprehensive history and analysis that explores the corporate interests that shape its conception and the movements that are developing alternatives. As the nature of industry changes, we might ask: what are the wider implications of the concept of IP, be it for agribusiness and pharmaceutical companies or the film and music industries? Has IP law has been used to safeguard and assert the ownership of ideas and creativity, or is it an essential foundation of our culture? Today, with mounting challenges from the growth of free software and open source movements, this collection provides an accessible and alternative guide to IP, exploring its significance within the wider struggle between capital and the commons.

Much attention has been given to the economics of everyday life, which typically applies economic principles to the analysis of the different choices that people face under different situations. Yet there are hardly any books on the economics of life—an economics that takes the finite lifespan as the starting point and that looks at how one can maximize the subjective value from life given the constraint of the limited lifespan. In this volume, Lok Sang Ho suggests that the lack of progress in happiness among developed countries despite significant economic growth is due to a deficit of "mental goods", rather than a lack of material goods. The author stresses the role of culture and mental habits in determining the efficacy of gaining mental goods which includes love, a sense of security and autonomy, contentment, self-esteem, self-acceptance, and freedom from anxiety. Drawing on empirical research, the book explores how to invest, work, and consume from a whole life perspective, arguing that every action - consumption, investment, or work - should enhance the total quality of life. This overriding concern about life itself is known as love. The Psychology and Economics of...

What if we could start with a blank slate, and write ourselves a brand new copyright system? What if we could design a law, from scratch, unconstrained by existing treaty obligations, business models and questions of political feasibility? Would we opt for radical overhaul, or would we keep our current fundamentals? Which parts of the system would we jettison? Which would we keep? In short, what might a copyright system designed to further the public interest in the current legal and sociological environment actually look like? Taking this thought experiment as their starting point, the leading international thinkers represented in this collection reconsider copyright’s fundamental questions: the subject matter that should be protected, the ideal scope and duration of those rights, and how it should be enforced. Tackling the biggest challenges affecting the current law, their essays provocatively explore how the law could better secure to creators the fruits of their labours, ensure better outcomes for the world’s more marginalised populations and solve orphan works. And while the result is a collection of impossible ideas, it also tells us much about what copyright could be...

Steep socioeconomic hierarchy in post-industrial Western society threatens public health because of the physiological consequences of material and psychosocial insecurities and deprivations. Following on from their previous books, the authors continue their exploration of the geography of early mortality from age-related chronic conditions, of risk behaviors and their health outcomes, and of infant and child mortality, all due to rigid hierarchy. They divide the 50 states into those that gave their electoral college votes to Trump and those that gave theirs to Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and compare the two sets for socioeconomic and public health profiles. They deliberately apply only simple standard statistical methods in the public health analyses: t-test, Mann-Whitney test, bivariate regression, and backward stepwise multivariate regression. The book assumes familiarity with basic statistics. The authors argue that the unequal power relations that result in eroding public health in the nation and, in particular, in the Trump-voting states, largely cascade from the collapse of American industry, and they analyze the Cold War roots of that collapse. In two largely...

Ensuring equity in healthcare is the main concern of health policymakers in order to provide a sustainable health system. This concern is more prominent in developing countries due to the scarcity of resources. This book provides a comprehensive analysis and discussion on the distributive pattern of out-of-pocket pharmaceutical expenditures under the health reforms in Turkey and makes comparisons with pharmerging countries. Turkey’s health reforms began in 2003 to address shortcomings related to financial protection and to improve health outcomes and the quality of healthcare services. The primary motivation was to ensure equity in the distribution of health resources, and this transformation process led to profound changes in how these resources were used, and in health financing in general. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the long-term effect of health reforms on the distribution patterns of health expenditures and health service use. This book offers a thorough equity analysis of the health financing system, affected by this health transformation program. Index and curve approaches are used in the equity analysis of pharmaceutical expenditures. The book...

This book explains how, and why, economics has been applied to a terrible pandemic, using a range of examples mostly drawn from the region most affected, sub-Saharan Africa. Part I shows that microeconomic approaches have found fertile ground in a public health approach that ‘blames’ individual choices for HIV transmission. Despite their attractiveness, however, these approaches fail to explain contemporary patterns of HIV prevalence, illustrating the importance of factors that are excluded from the standard micro-economic approach. Part II of the book looks at our problems in understanding the economic impact of AIDS, and explains why economists cannot agree if epidemic disease is a good or bad thing for economic development. In both sections of the book, the potential for alternative approaches is shown, and the book ends by arguing that a political economy approach can bring meaningful insights to our understanding of the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS.

This book brings together a collection of empirical case studies featuring a wide spectrum of medical innovation. While there is no unique pathway to successful medical innovation, recurring and distinctive features can be observed across different areas of clinical practice. This book examines why medical practice develops so unevenly across and within areas of disease, and how this relates to the underlying conditions of innovation across areas of practice. The contributions contained in this volume adopt a dynamic perspective on medical innovation based on the notion that scientific understanding, technology and clinical practice co-evolve along the co-ordinated search for solutions to medical problems. The chapters follow an historical approach to emphasise that the advancement of medical know-how is a contested, nuanced process, and that it involves a variety of knowledge bases whose evolutionary paths are rooted in the contexts in which they emerge. This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners concerned with medical innovation, management studies and the economics of innovation. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at ...

Happiness is a private matter and individual pursuit; however, public policy does have an important role and can contribute much through various enabling means. This volume discusses the determinants of happiness and presents case studies of how public policy can help promote happiness.

This is a collection consisting largely of poems and Lok- Sang's translation of the Daodejing, the Xin Xin Ming, and the Heart Sutra, plus a number of short passages grouped under the title of The Essence of Spirituality from A to Z. The book brings together the teachings from the west and from the east about how to live a rich, fulfilling life. Carrying the subtitle "a tribute to Life", the author promotes his "happiness formula" LIFE, consisting of Love, Insight, Fortitude, and Engagement, pleading with readers that Life is the only resource we have and that we all need to do the best we can to ensure that its potential can be realized. That is the surest and the only way to gain happiness. Professor Liah Greenfeld, Boston University: "Today, when history takes one of its true great turns ....Lok Sang Ho's book appears particularly timely.... It is a book of poetry not only because it contains masterful original renditions of the Song of the Truthful Mind, the Heart Sutra, and most remarkably, the Daodejing of Laozi, but essentially because it seems to feel its way to enlightenment with words, using words as a search-light, rather than a recording medium of ideas and...

Philosopher Mike W. Martin here examines the meaning of happiness by connecting it to the philosophical notion of "the good life."

This book documents the search for a workable model of democracy in Asia. It explores the various forms of Asian democracy practiced to date, and throws light on where these models may have failed and where they may have succeeded. The case studies developed provide valuable insights into governance and democracy in Asia (North-east, South-east and South) a region that remains fascinating and dynamic despite the impact of the recent global crisis. The book concludes that whilst there may not be a model that works best in all regions, a key ingredient to a workable model must include sound gove.

In this book, Johnston seeks to put the public interest onto the public relations ‘radar’, arguing the need for its clear articulation into mainstream public relations discourse. This book examines literature from a range of fields and disciplines to develop a clearer understanding of the concept, and then considers this within the theory and practice of public relations. The book’s themes include the role of language and discourse in establishing successful public interest PR and in perpetuating power imbalances; intersections between CSR, governance, law and the public interest; and how activism and social media have invigorated community control of the public interest. Chapters explore the role of the public interest, including cross-cultural and multicultural challenges, community and internal consultation, communication choices and listening to minorities and subaltern publics.

This book investigates and analyses critical issues in education reform and discusses possible pitfalls in the current global drive to promote excellence. Instead of documenting the successes and frustrations encountered by education reformers in specific jurisdictions, this book aims to offer directions for education reformers, and sets out to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. While the cases covered here are focused on Hong Kong, they are no less useful in throwing light upon the direction of education reform all over the world. The first section of the volume, “Conceptual Framework”, provides the theoretical underpinnings for the design and implementation of education reform. The next two sections, “Reform of Tertiary Education” and “Experiments, Dilemmas, and Risks in Secondary Schools” look at reform at the tertiary and secondary levels in greater detail. The final section, “Ideals vs. Reality: the Interplay of Diverse Interests and Diverse Perceptions”, looks at the conflicting goals and perceptions of different “stakeholders”, with a concluding chapter that summarizes the main lessons to be learnt. This book will be of interest to scholars,...

This book investigates and analyses critical issues in education reform and discusses possible pitfalls in the current global drive to promote excellence. Instead of documenting the successes and frustrations encountered by education reformers in specific jurisdictions, this book aims to offer directions for education reformers, and sets out to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. While the cases covered here are focused on Hong Kong, they are no less useful in throwing light upon the direction of education reform all over the world. The first section of the volume, “Conceptual Framework”, provides the theoretical underpinnings for the design and implementation of education reform. The next two sections, “Reform of Tertiary Education” and “Experiments, Dilemmas, and Risks in Secondary Schools” look at reform at the tertiary and secondary levels in greater detail. The final section, “Ideals vs. Reality: the Interplay of Diverse Interests and Diverse Perceptions”, looks at the conflicting goals and perceptions of different “stakeholders”, with a concluding chapter that summarizes the main lessons to be learnt. This book will be of interest to scholars,...

The book is a study on the administration of the Tung regime including Tung Chee-hwa's leadership and various branches of his government as well as the bureaucracy. It focuses on how Hong Kong has been governed since 1997 in view of the changing political and economic environments. It is an in-depth analysis on various aspects of society, the government and the economy under the Tung regime as much as an overall evaluation of his performance. Questions asked include: To what extent are government policies consistent compared with those under the colonial rule? What does "one country two systems" mean in reality and to what extent is the Tung regime successful to safeguard this principle in practice? Also, to what extent are external economic forces responsible to the seemingly deteriorating Hong Kong economy? How did the bubble of 1997 burst, and has the Hong Kong economy recovered under the stewardship of the Financial Secretary, Donald Tsang? Who are affected most by the restructuring of the economy, and what are some of the long-term implications for Hong Kong as an important world financial center? How are the changes felt and perceived by its people as a whole? Indeed, what...

This bibliography is a systematic and thorough guide to the findings of over one thousand recent English-language dissertations in a number of specific policy areas. It is divided into sixteen fields of concentration based on the amount and scope of work being done: policy analysis, policy making at the state level, policy making at the local level, public administration and the making of public policy, agricultural policy, civil rights and the status of women, domestic taxing and economic policy, educational policy, U.S. foreign policy, governmental regulation of morality: sex, drugs, and abortion, housing policy, energy and the environment, international trade and economics, judicial policy making, military policy, and social, health, and welfare policy. Within each section, the entries are arranged alphabetically by author and numbered sequentially. The volume contains a reader's guide and subject and author indexes.

"A world guide to government, university, independent nonprofit, and commercial research and development centers, institutes, laboratories, bureaus, test facilities, experiment stations, and data collection and analysis centers, as well as foundations, councils and other organizations which support research," [1992/93-].

Annotation Intra-regional trade has been rising rapidly, especially after China's accession to the WTO in 2001. China's economy is expanding at a great rate, and will soon surpass Japan to become the world's second largest economy. This book is based on papers presented by scholars at a conference on 'APEC at 20 and the Rise of China'.

'The global financial crisis has demonstrated that good governance is not guaranteed by democracy; it has also shown that the capacity of electoral democracies to manage major issues of public policy has varied widely. This excellent comparative collection probes these questions through analysis of ten political systems in Asia, all of which have experienced major changes in recent years. By focussing on the concept of public governance as the key to preventing abuses of power and promoting the public interest, Bridges, Ho and their co-authors have moved the debate on Asian democratization beyond the narrow focus on electoral machinery to the wider issue of governance as the principal means to serve the public good.' - James Cotton, Australian Defence Force Academy, Australia

The Asian crisis of 1997-1998 was a major influence on macroeconomic thinking concerning exchange rate regimes, the functioning of international institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and international contagion of macroeconomic instability from one country to another. Exchange Rate Regimes and Macroeconomic Stability offers perspectives on these issues from the viewpoints of two Nobel Laureates, an IMF economist, and Asian economists. This book contributes new ideas to the ongoing debate on the role of domestic monetary authorities and international institutions in reducing the likelihood of international financial crises, as well as the problems associated with various exchange rate regimes from the standpoint of macroeconomic stability. Overall, the chapters contained in this volume offer interesting perspectives, which have been stimulated by the recent events in the foreign exchange market. They provide a useful reference for anyone interested in the development of exchange rate regimes, and represent considerable reflection by economists half a century after Bretton Woods.

Hong Kong is ageing fast and the pressure to improve health care is mounting. Should taxes be raised or social services be cut? Should the public buy more health insurance? Using unofficial statistics and his survey data of households, the author analyzes the economics of these questions.